Barry Jones rarely dared to imagine his release from death row. Sometimes, when he was feeling low, his paralegal, whom he called Ms. Jennifer, tried to buoy his spirits by promising that one day his legal team would drive up in the “habeas van” to the desert prison in Florence, Arizona, honking and celebrating, ready to take him home. It was never going to be like that, of course. But neither could they have predicted where Jones would find himself on June 15, in his first moments of freedom after 29 years: alone at a Del Taco near the bus station, being told he could not use the phone.

The previous 24 hours had gone mostly according to plan. He’d spent Wednesday giving away most of his things to friends and neighbors on death row. The next morning, around 4:30 a.m., Jones ate some instant oatmeal for breakfast and prepared to leave his cell for the last time. He boarded a van for the ride down to Tucson, the sprawling prison complex fading from view behind him. By 9:30 he’d arrived at Pima County Superior Court, where a judge would sanction his release at a hearing later that morning. Jones had hoped to walk out there and then. Instead, he was driven around by officers with the Arizona Department of Corrections who didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They eventually arrived at a probation office, where he was finally uncuffed and given a change of clothes. Then they dumped him at the Greyhound station downtown.

With no money, no cellphone, and no experience navigating the city in decades, Jones looked for a pay phone to make a collect call but found none. “Even at the bus station — this is a bus station,” he later said with disbelief. “Wow.” So he started walking toward the one downtown address he knew: the office of the Arizona Federal Public Defender.

In a blue T-shirt, dark jeans, and white sneakers, Jones made his way west. He carried a trash bag with a few belongings and an envelope with his release documents inside. It was a typically bright, hot Arizona day. But he was struck by how green Tucson looked compared to Florence, where there was nothing but brown desert as far as the eye could see. “You know, this ain’t so bad,” he thought. If he didn’t find anyone at the office, he could try to find his son’s house. He could even sleep under a bridge if he had to. What mattered was that he was no longer in prison. “I can do whatever I want.”

What Jones didn’t know was that people were frantically looking for him. His daughter, Brandie, had gone with her family to the Pima County Jail, where she’d originally been told Jones would be held until his paperwork cleared. At the federal defender’s office, Jones’s longtime attorney, Cary Sandman, grew increasingly agitated as he made calls and sent emails looking for his client. When Sandman finally got word that Jones had been left at the bus station, retired investigator Andrew Sowards rushed out to pick him up. But when he got there, Jones was gone.

A search party ensued. Members of the legal team and staff from the Arizona Justice Project split up to look for Jones. Finally, around 2 p.m., a voice came through on speakerphone at the office: “We found him.” Jones was just a block away. He had walked more than a mile. A few minutes later, Jones came through the door, sweaty, smiling, and wearing a can you believe this? expression. Jennifer Schneider, the paralegal, gave him a T-shirt she had been saving for that day. It read “Free Bird.”

The first wave of family filed into the office a little while later. In a large conference room with panoramic windows, Jones reunited with his kids, Brandie, Andrew, and James, along with their children and extended relatives, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. His niece recounted the rush to drive to Tucson earlier that day: “I did 80 and 90 all the way down,” she said. Jones didn’t miss a beat, “I don’t wanna hear nothing about breaking the law.”

Before long, the stress from earlier had melted away. Sowards, one of Jones’s biggest supporters, was amazed as he watched Jones joke and laugh surrounded by people. Jones had never liked crowds in prison; Sowards was nervous he might feel overwhelmed. “But it was the exact opposite,” he said. He saw a side of Jones that was lost in the decades he spent on death row. Jones had been a social guy before his wrongful conviction. “He loves people and loves these people in particular. I think he’s always wanted to be the friendly guy that he was way back then.”

People repeatedly asked Jones what he wanted to eat, but he didn’t have an answer — somehow, he wasn’t hungry. But he did say he’d like to grill burgers that weekend. There was a park he liked to go to back in the day. They could have a cookout for Father’s Day. Brandie said it would be hot; maybe they could plan something indoors. But Jones said he’d rather be outside. “I’ve spent enough time inside.”

Barry Jones poses for a photo with members of his legal team at the office of the Arizona Federal Public Defender in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Innocence Isn’t Enough”

Jones’s release was the culmination of a harrowing saga that started almost 30 years earlier. After being sentenced to death in 1995 for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Jones thought his nightmare might be ending in 2018, when a federal judge overturned his conviction. Instead, his case became an emblem of Arizona’s dysfunctional death penalty, the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical rightward shift, and the cruelty of a legal system that prioritizes finality over fairness — even if it means executing an innocent person.

Jones was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. The child had died from a sharp blow to her abdomen, which led to a fatal case of peritonitis. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department singled out Jones as the sole suspect before an autopsy had even identified Rachel’s cause of death. Prosecutors based their case on a narrow window of time during which Jones had been seen with Rachel before she died.

But no one investigated the medical evidence: not the lead detective, Sonia Pesqueira, and not Jones’s own court-appointed attorneys, who left the state’s theory unchallenged at trial. It was only when Jones’s federal defenders took his case years later that they discovered the state’s timeline was medically impossible.

Assistant Federal Public Defender Cary Sandman, representing Barry Jones, appears before Judge Kyle Bryson at the Pima County Superior Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

The odds of Barry Jones getting this evidence into a courtroom were slim. Ideally, Jones’s state post-conviction lawyer would have challenged the trial lawyers’ failure to investigate the medical evidence, arguing that Jones received ineffective assistance of counsel — a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. Instead, his state post-conviction attorney compounded the trial lawyers’ mistakes.

Under the burdensome rules dictating federal habeas appeals, if a defendant failed to challenge their trial lawyers’ performance in state court, they would be barred from doing so in federal court. But in 2012, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Martinez v. Ryan carved out a rare path to relief for people like Jones: If the failure to bring such a claim was due to the post-conviction attorney’s own ineffectiveness, the petitioner should have another shot at relief.

The ruling got Jones back into federal court. In 2017, U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess presided over a seven-day evidentiary hearing in Tucson, where Sandman and his colleagues presented evidence that had never made it to trial. The testimony dismantled the state’s case against Jones, revealing not only the failings of his attorneys, but also law enforcement officials’ rush to judgment.

Burgess seemed disturbed by Pesqueira, who conceded that she never considered other suspects apart from Jones. And he seemed especially fed up with former Pima County medical examiner John Howard, whose testimony was critical to sending Jones to death row. Howard had previously estimated that Rachel’s abdominal injury was “most consistent” with occurring 24 hours or more before she died. But at Jones’s trial, he shortened the time frame to just 12 hours, which neatly fit the state’s theory of the crime.

In 2018, Burgess vacated Jones’s conviction. If not for the failures of his trial attorneys, the judge wrote, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.” Burgess ordered the state to retry Jones or release him.

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Instead, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich appealed, first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the core of Burgess’s findings, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state’s lawyers insisted that under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Jones should never have been allowed to present the evidence that persuaded Burgess to vacate his conviction. The argument seemed far-fetched: It would mean gutting the Supreme Court’s own ruling in Martinez v. Ryan. But to the dismay of Jones’s legal team, the court took the case.

During oral argument, the attorney general’s office said that it didn’t matter if the evidence showed Jones was not responsible for the crime that sent him to death row. “Innocence isn’t enough,” the state’s lawyer, Brunn Wall Roysden III, said. In May 2022, the justices agreed, reinstating Jones’s death sentence and destroying a lifeline for incarcerated people whose lawyers failed them at trial.

Barry Jones greets his family after his release following 29 years on Arizona’s death row.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Some Measure of Justice”

I first wrote about Barry Jones in 2017, in advance of the federal evidentiary hearing in Tucson. One of the first people I met was a juror from his trial, who was haunted by her role in the case. As she recalled it, the evidence against Jones was weak — so weak, she thought surely his conviction had already been overturned. She was distressed to learn that he still faced execution. Before she died in 2020, she expressed hope that Jones would be exonerated.

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Over time, I came to learn just how many people believed in Jones’s innocence, including current and former members of his legal team. They worried about Jones’s mental health, which had been ravaged by his time on death row. Before his conviction was overturned, Jones saw 34 neighbors taken to the death chamber. After executions were placed on hold in Arizona following a series of botched lethal injections, Brnovich pushed to resume them last year. In the months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones’s case, known as Shinn v. Ramirez, three more men were executed.

In the meantime, however, some critical shifts began to take place. At a hearing in September, Burgess urged lawyers on both sides to consider settling Jones’s case through mediation. “I do think it would be in everybody’s best interest, including society’s best interest, if we can resolve this case,” he said. A judge was assigned to oversee the process.

Two months later, Arizona voters elected a new attorney general, with Democratic candidate Kris Mayes defeating her Republican opponent by just a few hundred votes — one of the closest margins in state history. For Arizona’s death row, the result was literally the difference between life and death. In January, Mayes announced that she was putting executions on hold.

Throughout it all, Jones tried not to get his hopes up. He was encouraged by the judge overseeing the mediation; at their first meeting in December, she had spoken to him for an hour and seemed genuinely committed to a just result. But after almost three decades of wrongful incarceration, he knew better than to pin his hopes on any legal process.

As the months passed, Sandman tried to visit Jones in Florence once a week. In April, he told Jones that there was a tentative agreement that could allow him to walk free, but it would require him to plead guilty to failing to take Rachel to the hospital the night before she died.

The Supreme Court decision left Barry Jones with “a series of bad choices.”

Jones never wished to plead guilty to any part of his case. But as Sandman told Burgess at the hearing last fall, the Shinn decision left them with “a series of bad choices.” At 64, Jones did not have time to litigate for another decade — and even if he did, there was little reason to trust the courts. “The only way to get some measure of justice for him was to compromise,” Sandman said. Jones’s close family friend, Debbie Wheeler, urged him to agree to the deal. “I said, ‘Barry, just sign whatever you have to do to get out.’”

On April 19, Burgess approved the settlement agreement between Jones’s attorneys and the state. Two weeks later, Sandman filed a petition with the Pima County Superior Court requesting that Jones’s conviction be overturned. The state would agree to the request on the condition that Jones plead guilty to the agreed-upon charge. He would then be sentenced to 25 years with credit for time served.

On May 22, the one-year anniversary of the Shinn decision, Pima Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson agreed to the terms. He set a hearing for June 15. Over the next few weeks, the reality that Jones might actually be released started to sink in. “You could tell he was believing it,” Wheeler said. “But it was just so hard for him to process it.”

Just before 11 a.m. on June 15, dozens of people packed a small courtroom on the eighth floor of the courthouse in downtown Tucson. In his orange prison uniform, Jones turned and smiled at his family and friends. Brandie, his daughter, blew him a kiss and cracked a joke about his thinning hair. Her dad looked happy, she said. Everyone seemed to know it was real this time.

Still, it was impossible not to be anxious. Sandman had felt like he was walking a tightrope for months. It wasn’t until the week of the hearing that he finally felt “99.9 percent sure” the judge would sign the order. Sitting in a row behind him was Sowards, the retired investigator, whose anxiety shot up as soon as the judge started talking. When Bryson said he was taking up Jones’s “potential change in plea and sentencing,” all Sowards could hear was the word “potential” ringing in his ears.

“I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Before the judge signed the order, a victim’s advocate approached the podium to share a statement from Rachel’s sister Becky. She was 10 years old when Jones was accused of killing her sister and testified against him at trial. I never managed to reach Becky, but in 2022 she was contacted by producers with the true-crime podcast “Conviction,” who made a two-part series about Jones’s case based on my reporting. It was then that Becky learned of the evidence that had emerged after Jones was sent to death row. By the end of her statement, several people in the courtroom were wiping away tears, including Jones.

“Your honor, I have spent the better part of almost 30 years hating the defendant for what happened to my sister Rachel,” the statement began. Although Becky had forgiven Jones for what she thought he’d done, she was shocked to learn about the Supreme Court’s decision in his case, which came down on her birthday. She no longer believed he was a murderer. In fact, she wished he could be released with no strings attached. “I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Barry Jones, left, and his lead attorney, Cary Sandman, pose for a portrait in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Free Bird

By the end of the day, Jones was settled into a rental unit overlooking a pool near the University of Arizona. Sowards had arranged for Jones to stay there for the next two weeks, and the fridge was stocked with food: burger patties, bottles of Pepsi, and ice cream. A jar of candy sat on the counter next to a Keurig coffee pot. Jones had never seen anything like it.

Schneider, the paralegal, had gotten Jones a flip phone, filling it with contacts. They discussed email and Wi-Fi — technology that he would learn to use. But there were so many other things to take in, the kinds of things that others take for granted. At the lawyers’ office, he’d walked by a bathroom and stared for a moment. He hadn’t seen a porcelain toilet in almost 30 years.

When we first spoke in 2017, Jones told me how nervous he felt contemplating life on the outside. Now, he said, “I just wanna be your average Joe.” He was immensely grateful for his legal team, who treated him like family. Sowards had posted a GoFundMe to help with housing and other basic needs. There were plans to take him shopping, out to eat, and to get him a state ID. One of his former attorneys was even planning to stay at the apartment with him that night, just to make sure he was OK. Still, Jones admitted, “I’m worried about most everything.”

Standing by the pool as the evening wore down, Jones joked that he would have to learn the names of all his grandchildren. It was hard not to think about the horror of what he’d been accused of and how unfathomable it seemed. Since 1994, family and friends had always said Jones would never hurt a child. Now the rest of the world could see what they knew to be true. Jones smiled as his granddaughter splashed around. “It does my heart good to see that,” he said.

The post After 29 Years on Death Row, Barry Jones Was Dumped at a Bus Station. But He Was Finally Free. appeared first on The Intercept.

Waiting for him outside the prison alongside his daughter were lawyers with the Tennessee Innocence Project as well as Claude’s most devoted advocates: his pen pal-turned-mentor, Denny Griswold, and his loyal friend and staunch supporter, veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne. There were hugs and handshakes and some brief words for the press. Then he got into Deana’s car and rode away.

Claude spent the next few months making up for lost time. He swam in the ocean on Father’s Day and played basketball on the Fourth of July. He stared at the stars with Deana and wrestled and took selfies with his grandson. He went to church with Denny, whose prison ministry first brought them together. And he visited the grave of his mother, Betty, who had always hoped to see him exonerated.

Claude also got good at texting. He sent memes and funny messages and inspirational quotes. “Surround yourself with people who push you to do and be better,” read one he sent me last summer. “No drama and negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation.”

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I first met Claude at Riverbend while working on a piece about his case. Published in 2015, my investigation told the story of how he had been sent to prison for life for the murder of his girlfriend, Lorie Lance, who died in a fire in the couple’s home outside Nashville in 1992. His conviction was rooted in junk science — evidence once believed to indicate arson that had since been debunked. Eventually my coverage caught the attention of the local district attorney, whose conviction review unit reinvestigated the case. By the time Claude walked out of prison, we had been talking for nine years. But in many ways, I was only just starting to know him.

Early one morning in mid-September, Claude called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. A couple of hours later, we were on the patio of a cafe downtown. It was a beautiful, clear day. One of Nashville’s major music events, AMERICANAFEST, was underway, and the place was packed. But Claude didn’t mind. He was taking it in, enjoying the scene. “Everybody’s out, moving around, enjoying life,” he said.

Claude had tried to keep a low profile after his release. He’d gone to North Carolina, where Deana lived, and had only recently moved with her family to Clarksville, northwest of Nashville. Deana, who ran a real estate agency, set him up in a rental property. He got a used car and a job doing plumbing and electric work — labor he’d done in prison for years. And he tried to help Deana when she needed it. She loved Halloween and started decorating well in advance. So that morning he’d gone to a Halloween store. He smiled mischievously revealing his costume for Deana’s upcoming party. “I want to go as a cop,” he said.

In early October, Garrett texted to say that the Tennessee Innocence Project was holding its annual fundraising gala. It seemed like an exciting opportunity to celebrate his release. But in truth, he was ambivalent about attending. For years he’d told people, “I don’t want to be anyone’s pet convict.” As proud as he was of his exoneration, he did not want to be defined by it.

In the end, he decided to go anyway. He took his friend Norman, whom he’d met in prison, as his guest. At the table alongside exonerees, Norman felt a little out of place (“I was the only one who was guilty”), but they had a good time. At one point the two accidentally locked themselves out of the enormous Music City Center and had to walk around the building. Norman, a lifelong smoker, was huffing and puffing. Claude teased him, asking, “Are you sure you’re going to make it?”

Three days later, on October 30, I was in my car getting ready to drive back to Nashville from New York when I got another text message. It came from Stuart’s wife, Gigi. Deana had called. “Claude passed away last night,” she said. He’d gone to the Halloween party and had a great time. Then he fell asleep and never woke up.

Claude Garrett plays with his 4-year-old grandson in North Carolina in May 2022.

Photo: Courtesy of Deana Watson

Just Starting Over

In many ways, Claude was luckier than most people who leave prison after decades. He had a job. He had a place to live. And he had the support of family and friends. “If every person that was released had the same opportunities that I had when I walked out that door, the recidivism rate would be 0.0 something,” Claude told me. Most of the time, “nobody is standing at the door to welcome them home and say, ‘Hey man, come with me, I’m gonna take care of you.’”

But even the best of circumstances couldn’t make up for the impact of incarceration. At 65, Claude carried untold physical and psychological trauma. Studies have long shown that prison ages people prematurely. For people who spend decades in prison under a wrongful conviction, the stress does not go simply go away after release. According to the Innocence Project, “Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, institutionalization, and depression.”

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Claude spent his first 30 days of freedom acutely aware that the Tennessee attorney general could appeal the decision to vacate his conviction. He went out of his way not to say anything publicly that could make him a target of backlash, especially about state authorities. When I told him I was struck by the fact that he had eaten his first strawberry in 30 years, he said he didn’t want to be quoted criticizing the Department of Correction for not providing fresh fruit. “That’s part of the system,” he said. “And that can be interpreted in many ways.”

A lot of stress seemed to dissipate after the state’s deadline to appeal passed. “All agree that it is officially official,” he texted me on June 11. “Free at last!” Yet the challenge of navigating his new surroundings was only beginning. On his first morning after leaving prison, he woke up before 4 a.m. and went to the garage to work out, only to set off the home security system. The next night, he was jolted out of bed by the sound of the ice machine. The house was just so quiet. He had not experienced that level of silence in 30 years.

Claude and Deana laughed about these things at the time. They told me about a failed first attempt to get a cellphone; Claude got fed up at the Verizon store after seeing a man appear to cut the line. “He said, ‘Shit, I’ll stop at a payphone,’” Deana said. “And I’m like, ‘No you won’t, they don’t work! They don’t exist!’” It didn’t dawn on Claude until later that the man probably had an appointment. He didn’t know it worked that way. There were a lot of situations like that. There should be lessons for people leaving prison, Claude told me. “A dinosaur like me? No idea.”

In retrospect, there were signs that Claude was struggling more than he let on. He was staying home at lot, he told me in September. “I still don’t feel comfortable getting out by myself.” If something bad were to occur in a place he happened to be, “Somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, he was here.’” And he avoided any potential run-ins with police, even if it meant driving 55 miles an hour on the highway. A lot of drivers are “just nuts,” he said, before conceding that the same could be said about him. “I’m not kicking dirt on them without getting dirt on me. Because sometimes I’m nuts too.”

He did have something motivating him: a new legal fight that he wasn’t ready to discuss publicly. He’d consulted with an attorney who planned to help him win compensation. In Tennessee, a person who is wrongfully convicted must be formally exonerated by the governor before they are eligible to receive money from the state. There was no way Gov. Bill Lee would do that in 2022 — an election year, Claude said. But this was his next big goal. It wasn’t just about the money, although “I do believe that they owe me.” They also owed Deana, who was 5 years old when he went to prison. By taking her father away for so long, “her life was stolen too.”

Otherwise, Claude was taking things one day at a time. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle and a dog; maybe chickens his grandson could chase in the backyard. And he was trying to stay healthy, just like he’d done in prison. The day before we met for coffee, he’d toured a Planet Fitness. He liked that it was open 24 hours (he was still getting up before 4 a.m.). But he hadn’t signed up yet. When he told the gym employee that he didn’t have a bank card, “he looked at me like I was an alien,” Claude said. “And I just told him, ‘Look man, I was in prison for 30 years for something I didn’t do. … I’m just starting over.’”

Claude Garrett has a banana split on Father’s Day weekend in Carolina Beach, N.C.

Photo: Courtesy of Deana Watson

Only So Much Time

Claude’s memorial service was held on November 5 in Springfield, Tennessee. There were colorful index cards at the funeral home for people to share memories of Claude, “aka Shorty,” as he was nicknamed when he was younger. In lieu of flowers, Deana asked guests to consider donating to the Tennessee Innocence Project.

The funeral was packed. Country music ballads opened and closed the service (“Even Though I’m Leaving” by Luke Combs and “You Should Be Here” by Cole Swindell). Deana thanked everyone who had worked to exonerate her father. “You gave a man his life back,” she said. Members of Claude’s family in Kansas spoke; a nephew who had sent Claude a typewriter recalled how he typed all his letters despite having “amazing penmanship.” A cousin who had fought with Claude as a kid remembered the beautiful cards he mailed to her while she was being treated for cancer.

A month after Claude’s funeral, I visited Norman at the halfway house where he lives and works. There was a Christmas tree in the living room, a reminder of the holidays Claude did not get to see as a free man. For a long time while Claude was in prison, Norman planned to save a room for him there. He showed me some letters and leatherwork Claude had sent him over the years. Deana had also given him a bunch of Claude’s clothes, which were piled in his bedroom. “People come in here and don’t have nothing,” he said.

Norman was distraught by Claude’s death. The two had been trusted friends on the inside and outside. He was one of the few people in Claude’s life who understood how destabilizing it could be to leave prison and find the world around you changed. “You don’t see that when you’re in there. You think everything is just the same.” Norman remembered feeling completely overwhelmed. He didn’t want to go back, but “I didn’t feel like I belonged out here either.”

He was still grasping for explanations. He imagined that being wrongfully incarcerated would compound the stress of living behind bars. “You’re in a place you shouldn’t be. And you’re in there 24 hours a day thinking about it, trying to get out. I mean, he fought every day for 29 and a half years. So I imagine it did take a toll on him, some way or another.”

There was no such thing as preventative medical care in prison, Norman said. Norman, who is about two years younger than Claude, didn’t know he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease until he’d been out for two years. Today he sees a primary care doctor and lung specialist and gets regular blood tests. In prison, “unless somebody stabs you, you ain’t gonna get no blood test.”

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A few days later, I went to see Stuart Bayne, the fire investigator, at his home in East Tennessee. He showed me his office, where he’d worked for so many years on Claude’s case. Since 2001, when he was hired as the expert witness for Claude’s retrial, Stuart had firmly believed in his innocence. After Claude was convicted again, Stuart became consumed with correcting what he saw as a profound miscarriage of justice. It had been his life’s mission ever since.

Like everyone who was still processing Claude’s death, Stuart was stricken by the unfairness of it all. Claude had been so patient — so hardworking and focused. He believed he would live another 20 years. “I haven’t told my poker group yet,” Stuart confessed. Claude was supposed to join one of their game nights. But he took comfort in the fact that Claude had gotten to come over for a home-cooked meal. Over years of phone conversations while Claude was in prison, “he wanted to know everything Gigi was making whenever he called.”

Stuart had no recollection of the moment he’d learned of Claude’s death. It was such a shock, his wife told me. Stuart could not grasp what Deana was saying until Gigi told him, “Honey, she’s talking about Claude.” They got the news while at a fire investigators conference in Alabama, where Stuart was supposed to speak about Claude’s case. Somehow, he moved forward with the presentation, deciding to close by revealing what had happened: a reminder that “we only have so much time we get in this here world and we better use it as best we can.”

Claude Garrett and his daughter, Deana Watson, in Hiawatha, Kan., in August 2022.

Photo: Courtesy of Deana Watson

A Chance to Grieve

In early January, I went to see Deana at her home in Clarksville. In the years I knew Claude, he never wanted me to include her in my articles. He wanted to protect her. But she had come to believe that families like hers needed to share their stories. His wrongful conviction had shaped her too. And as much as Claude wanted to move on with his life after prison, she told him, “If you don’t tell this story, nothing changes.”

Deana had given me a photo album that told the story of Claude’s last five months, from his first breath of fresh air outside Riverbend to the Halloween party. When he walked in wearing his police costume that night, “people were rolling laughing,” she said. He was still wearing it when she found him the next morning.

Deana was trying not to dwell on questions she couldn’t answer. The autopsy results had not come back yet. “I have not let myself think about this very much,” she said. But Claude’s family had a history of heart problems. When Deana went to clean out his house, she found blood pressure medication he’d brought from Riverbend that had not been refilled. She remembered him saying that he could not go to the doctor until his insurance kicked in, which would have been November 1, just two days after he died.

The thought that Claude had left prison only to find himself without the medication he needed felt like too cruel an irony. But Deana also knew that his death was not the result of any one thing. On his last night alive, he’d been “the life of the party,” talking to everyone and making s’mores with the kids, although he was wary of fires. She reiterated what she said at the funeral: He was the happiest he’d ever been.

Still, things had not been perfect. Helping Deana with her Halloween decorations, which included a pair of 12-foot skeletons, he protested in jest. “He’s like, ‘This is a sickness. … Did I do something wrong in your childhood?’” she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘I mean, you did go to prison.’” By October, they had begun arguing in earnest. Deana could see his anger and trauma surfacing in ways that were hard to comprehend. One day he said, “I can’t believe no one is talking about Lorie.” Deana realized he had only just started processing her death. He insisted on visiting her grave the day after he left prison, searching frantically to find it. When he did, he stood there for a long time. In all the decades he spent fighting, he never had a chance to grieve.

Claude Garrett visits the grave of Lorie Lance.

Photo: Courtesy of Deana Watson

The findings didn’t bring much closure. Deana found more comfort in letters she’d sent him in prison, which she found at his house. She had written them in her early 20s, while trying to forge a relationship with a father she’d never really known. At that time, she could not have imagined all the things she would eventually do with him. If he ever got out, she wrote, she wanted to go to the beach with him. She just wanted to talk and have quality time. “I think that’s what I’m missing the most.”

The post Claude Garrett Was Wrongfully Imprisoned for Decades. He Died After Five Months of Freedom. appeared first on The Intercept.

After the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Glossip’s clemency request last month, Lea was the person he turned to. “I called her the second I got back to my cell,” he said. “I told the guards, ‘I need to get back there.’ … Whenever things get really tough for me, and I feel at my lowest point, I know that I can talk to Lea and she can pick me up from that.”

Now they faced a dreaded ritual they’d already confronted multiple times: preparing for Glossip’s transfer to Death Watch, one of the final stages of the state’s death penalty protocol. Their last contact visit was scheduled for Friday, May 5 — one more chance to hug, kiss, and hold hands. Afterward, Lea would take Glossip’s belongings home, while he prepared to be moved to a holding cell adjacent to the execution chamber.

Lea arrived earlier than usual that day, around 9 a.m. She was accompanied by the legendary anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, Glossip’s spiritual adviser. Three other high-profile advocates joined them: Republican state Reps. Kevin McDugle and Justin Humphrey, as well as GOP politico Justin Jackson. With Glossip’s May 18 execution date looming, the visit was more of a strategy session than a series of goodbyes. No one was ready to give up.

Around noon, Sister Helen and the politicians decided to leave in order to give Lea and Glossip some privacy, or whatever passed for privacy in a crowded visiting room. But first, they all stepped into the hallway to take some photos — a privilege not usually afforded to the men on death row, which the interim warden had arranged himself. In one photo, Lea stood in front of her husband wearing a wide smile, clasping his cuffed hand in both of hers.

Once back in the visiting room, it was harder to keep a brave face. As 3 p.m. approached, Glossip held Lea’s hands tighter. “He kept telling me, you know, something could happen,” she said. “We’re gonna get through it no matter what.”

“Then, all of a sudden, the warden comes in and says, ‘I need both of you. Come out to the hallway,’” Lea said. The room went quiet. Since their visit was coming to an end, Lea assumed the warden wanted to discuss handing over the box of property. Instead, he told them that the U.S. Supreme Court had just stayed Glossip’s execution. “And we just completely, completely crumbled into each other.”

Upon their return to the visiting room, they raised their arms up together and said, “We got the stay.” And the room erupted with cheers.

Lea and Richard Glossip at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on May 5, 2023.

Courtesy of Lea Glossip

Confession of Error

The stay of execution was the latest twist in a seemingly never-ending saga that has seen Glossip come close to execution nine different times. Just one month earlier, the state’s attorney general, Genter Drummond, had asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, saying he could no longer stand by the conviction.

But in a series of devastating blows, the court rejected Drummond’s motion and said it saw no reason to stay Glossip’s execution. By then, Glossip’s lawyers had filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to address misconduct in the case that had recently come to light. But it was only after the legal team filed a second petition — and a request for a stay backed by the attorney general himself — that the high court intervened, blocking the execution while it considers whether to take the case.

Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost entirely on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked at the motel as a handyman.

Sneed admitted to murdering Van Treese but claimed it was all Glossip’s idea. On Sneed’s word alone, prosecutors theorized that Glossip wanted Van Treese dead so he could take over operations of the low-rent motel. At trial, they painted Sneed as powerless to resist Glossip’s command to kill the boss. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.

Glossip has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has mounted. New evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed, a chronic drug user with a violent streak, initially planned to rob Van Treese and killed him when the plan went sideways. Sneed implicated Glossip in this scheme during a highly suggestive police interrogation. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward to say that Sneed was cunning and manipulative and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

Glossip’s defense team has also uncovered a cascade of police and prosecutorial misconduct. The state destroyed a box of crucial evidence before Glossip was retried in 2004, and it suppressed evidence that Sneed sought to recant his incriminating testimony. More recently, Glossip’s legal team found notes reflecting that prosecutor Connie Smothermon knew that portions of Sneed’s testimony were false.

Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place.

Drummond had highlighted Sneed’s misstatements in his brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial.

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Despite the overwhelming evidence that the state got it wrong, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has routinely rejected Glossip’s appeals. In April, the judges all but ignored Drummond’s confession of error and explained away Sneed’s misstatements, finding that he was “likely in denial of his mental health disorders.”

The court’s ruling triggered the 35-day protocol preceding Glossip’s execution date, including a hearing on April 26 before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, whose members are empowered to recommend clemency to the governor. At the hearing, Drummond sided with Glossip’s defense team; it was the first time in Oklahoma’s history that an attorney general argued in favor of clemency for a person on death row.

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The board was not swayed. To secure a clemency recommendation, Glossip needed a favorable vote from three members. Instead, the board deadlocked, voting 2-2. Under board rules, a tie is weighted in favor of the “no” votes, resulting in a denial of clemency.

The Oklahoma Constitution requires that the board be comprised of five “impartial” members, three appointed by the governor, and one each appointed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals. For Glossip’s hearing, however, just four were present; board member Richard Smothermon, who is married to the prosecutor at the center of Glossip’s misconduct claims, had recused himself from the case in July 2022.

Despite the advance warning, nothing was done to fix the issue: While the state constitution requires a five-member board, state statutes and administrative rules provide no mechanism for the designation of an alternate when a member is recused.

Two days before the hearing, Don Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma County District Court asking the court to permanently bar the state from executing Glossip absent a clemency hearing conducted within constitutional parameters.

By allowing the board to make clemency decisions without its full complement of members, the state was putting a greater burden on Glossip, Knight argued. Instead of winning three out of five votes, he would be required to secure three of four. Knight asked the court to declare the April 26 hearing “void of any legal effect.” The lawsuit remains pending.

The Fight Ahead

Both of the petitions pending before the Supreme Court deal with crucial evidence that the state withheld from Glossip’s defense. The first petition was filed in early January, when Glossip was facing a February execution date. The state responded quickly, asking the court to reject the petition. Notably, the court has repeatedly put off considering the case; so far it has been scheduled for discussion six times.

By the end of January, much had changed. The outgoing attorney general, John O’Connor, was replaced by Genter Drummond, who quickly launched an independent investigation into Glossip’s case and released to Glossip’s attorneys a box of prosecution records that O’Connor had refused to let the defense see. The box contained the records related to Sneed’s misleading testimony, evidence that prompted Drummond to conclude that Glossip’s conviction could not stand.

Drummond’s intervention may not have moved the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals or the parole board, but it is clear that the Supreme Court is taking his position more seriously. Not only did the attorney general join Glossip’s motion for a stay of execution, which the court granted on May 5, but there is also every indication that he will join Glossip’s appeal to the court.

To McDugle, the state lawmaker, Oklahoma’s response to Glossip’s case has damaged the credibility of key state institutions. “This case is no longer about justice,” he said at a press conference at the Oklahoma State Capitol the day before the stay was granted. “It’s about power, pride, and politics. That’s what it’s become.”

Oklahoma state Rep. Kevin McDugle, R-Broken Arrow, speaks during a news conference in Oklahoma City on May 4, 2023, about the efforts to halt the execution of Richard Glossip.

Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP

McDugle said that prior to getting involved in Glossip’s case, he didn’t realize how “deeply embedded” the state’s prosecutors are in all branches of government. Through the District Attorneys Council, they apply pressure across the system to protect their power.

This dynamic explained the presence of several district attorneys from across the state at Glossip’s clemency hearing: The point was not only to stare down the board and get them to vote “no,” but also to demonstrate their objection to the attorney general’s unprecedented intervention. Among them was former Oklahoma County DA David Prater, who took extreme measures to defend Glossip’s conviction — including orchestrating the arrest of a witness who came forward with information about Sneed.

The District Attorneys Council has actively sought to undermine Prater’s successor, Vicki Behenna, the county’s first female elected DA. In April, Behenna wrote a letter to the parole board noting that under new guidelines she had instituted, Glossip’s case would not be eligible for capital prosecution. Behenna’s position has further fueled backlash to the attorney general’s intervention. Prater and the District Attorneys Council know that if the courts agree that Glossip’s conviction should be overturned, it will be up to Behenna to decide whether to retry the case.

On Tuesday, Glossip’s supporters held a rally on the front steps of the Oklahoma Capitol. The featured speaker was Phil McGraw, whose coverage of Glossip’s case in 2015 prompted new witnesses to come forward. Knight, Glossip’s lawyer, reminded the crowd that the fight was not over. The Supreme Court stay represented one victory in a battle that will “rage on” until Glossip is freed, he said. Lea emphasized that there was still a lot of work to be done and thanked everyone for supporting their efforts. “We truly do need all of you — especially as Oklahomans — right now.”

As she told The Intercept, the last month has been a legal and emotional rollercoaster. “It feels like this really insane detour just happened. Now we’re just getting back on the road we were supposed to be on,” she said. “And I like to think it was a good vindication for Drummond also because he’s taken so much blowback.”

On the morning after the Supreme Court granted the stay, Lea and Glossip felt a sense of relief they hadn’t felt in a long time. “That was the first good night’s sleep we both had in a while,” Lea said. “Saturday was the first day we’ve woken up in 11 months without an execution date over us.”

The post The “Power, Pride, and Politics” Behind the Drive to Execute Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

But in a stunning rebuke, the court rejected the attorney general’s request, triggering the 35-day protocol that precedes an execution. Perhaps most critical: a hearing on April 26 before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, whose members are empowered to recommend clemency to the governor, serving as a final check against a wrongful execution.

There was every reason to expect the board would vote to spare Glossip’s life. Among the witnesses who appeared on Glossip’s behalf on Wednesday was Attorney General Gentner Drummond himself, along with prominent Oklahoma lawmakers who have come to believe in Glossip’s innocence.

Yet in another stunning reversal of fortune, the board voted to deny clemency. Barring intervention by the courts or Gov. Kevin Stitt, Glossip will be executed by lethal injection on May 18.

“It’s horrifying,” Don Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, said. But “we’re not done, by a long shot.”

Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old live-in manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked as a handyman at the motel. Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but claimed it was all Glossip’s idea. Prosecutors claimed Glossip killed Van Treese in a scheme to take over the low-rent motel and painted Sneed as a meek dolt who would do anything Glossip asked of him. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided facing the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has steadily mounted.

Counter to the state’s fanciful narrative, the evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed — a chronic drug user with a penchant for unpredictable bouts of violence — initially planned to rob Van Treese, killed him when the plan went sideways, and then later, during a highly suggestive police interrogation, named Glossip as the mastermind behind the crime. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward with evidence that Sneed was cunning, manipulative, and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

Knight has spent nearly a decade investigating and presenting to the court new evidence that undercuts Glossip’s conviction. Still, at every turn, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has willfully ignored the myriad problems with the case — including prosecutorial misconduct and the state’s destruction of evidence. That same evidence, meanwhile, has led a contingent of conservative, pro-death penalty lawmakers to advocate on Glossip’s behalf over fears the state might execute an innocent man.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond takes notes at the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board clemency hearing for Richard Glossip on April 26, 2023.

Photo: Doug Hoke/The Oklahoman

The State Got Away With It

The clemency hearing took place at the Kate Barnard Community Corrections Center, a women’s jail complex in Northeast Oklahoma City. The fluorescent-lit room was packed compared to most clemency hearings, with seven rows of chairs assigned to attendees in advance. As in all such proceedings, victims’ family members sat on one side of the room, alongside representatives of the state, while advocates for Glossip sat on the other. Unlike most hearings, both sections included current and former elected officials, most notably Drummond, who was there representing the state and advocating for clemency, the first time an Oklahoma attorney general has ever done so.

“If the defense would’ve destroyed that box of evidence, there would have been charges brought against them. But the state seemingly got away with it.”

Among the most conspicuous attendees was former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, whose office sent Glossip to death row. Before his retirement in January, Prater aggressively defended Glossip’s conviction, intimidating witnesses who came forward with new evidence in 2015 and accusing Glossip of waging a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater also previously targeted the parole board for recommending clemency in other cases, accusing members of having an anti-death penalty bias. Wearing a dark pinstriped suit, an American flag pin, and a permanent scowl, Prater sat in the fifth row alongside prosecutors from other parts of the state. While he did not speak before the board, Prater shook his head as witnesses described the state’s destruction of evidence and other prosecutorial misconduct.

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Each side had 40 minutes to present their case, followed by remarks by the Van Treese family and Glossip himself. A large digital clock faced the speakers, while TV monitors faced the board. One of the five board members, Richard Smothermon, was absent, having recused himself due to the fact that his wife was the prosecutor who sent Glossip to death row.

Knight told the board that Glossip grew up in a chaotic household where family members struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike a number of his 15 siblings, Glossip managed to avoid running afoul of the law, and after dropping out of school, he worked hard to build a quiet and successful life for himself. He became a manager at Domino’s Pizza before turning to management of a string of motels. “It may not seem like much, but for a guy with a seventh-grade education … it was pretty good,” Knight told the board. The idea that Glossip was scheming to take over the Best Budget Inn was inconceivable, Knight said. It was a fiction dreamed up by Sneed, “a man who now everyone, even the state, admits is a liar.”

“People rarely begin a life of crime at 34,” Knight went on. In contrast, Sneed had a long history of criminal behavior before he killed Van Treese at 19, including threatening to kill his middle school teacher. “The worst thing on Rich Glossip’s record? A traffic ticket.”

Republican state lawmakers described how they had come to believe in Glossip’s innocence. Each said he was skeptical at first; they didn’t believe that an innocent person could wind up on death row. But as they learned more about the case, and new evidence continued to emerge, they concluded that Glossip’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

Central to their conclusion was the work of law firm Reed Smith, which undertook a pro bono investigation into the case at the behest of a larger group of lawmakers led by Republican Rep. Kevin McDugle. Reed Smith spent more than a year on its investigation, interviewed more than 40 witnesses, and gathered records from multiple state agencies, producing five reports that paint the clearest picture yet of Glossip’s wrongful conviction. McDugle told the board that he asked the investigators to go where the facts took them. “I simply want them to find the truth in this case,” he said.

“In reading their findings, I was sickened that something like this could happen in the state of Oklahoma,” McDugle said. “Their investigation concluded that based on the complete record, old and new evidence, no reasonable jury hearing it all would have convicted Glossip of murder for hire.” McDugle was especially disturbed by the state’s destruction of a box of evidence before Glossip’s second trial in 2004, including the motel’s financial records and crime scene evidence that could have been tested for DNA. “If the defense would’ve destroyed that box of evidence, there would have been charges brought against them. But the state seemingly got away with it.”

Justin Jackson, a political ally of the governor’s, struck a more personal note. He said that he’d gotten to know Glossip during visits to death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Today he describes him as a friend and “brother in Christ.” “Rich has never wavered once in his claim of innocence,” Jackson said. He held up a painting of a hummingbird that Glossip made for Jackson’s mother, who was dying of cancer. Glossip said that for him, the hummingbird represented freedom from death row — but for Jackson’s mother, he hoped it would represent freedom from pain and suffering. When his mother died in 2020, Jackson said, “Rich had no way of knowing of my mom’s passing but by happenstance he called me later that morning. And he spent the next 30 minutes consoling me.”

Don Knight, Richard Glossip’s lead attorney, listens as Glossip speaks to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board via video at the clemency hearing on April 26, 2023.

Photo: Doug Hoke/The Oklahoman

An Unprecedented Hearing

When it was the state’s turn to present its case to the board, Drummond began by acknowledging each speaker, along with Van Treese’s loved ones. “I know that this has been an extremely difficult process for the family to endure.”

“I’m not aware of anytime in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency.”

“I want to acknowledge how unusual it is for the state to support a clemency application of a death row inmate,” Drummond said. “I’m not aware of anytime in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it. Ultimately that is why we are here.” As the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Drummond said, it was his duty to consider “what justice is for the state of Oklahoma.” That’s what led him to finally release evidence that had never been turned over to Glossip’s legal team. It’s also what led him to launch an investigation of his own into the case.

Christina Vitale, a lawyer who was part of the Reed Smith investigation, presented a PowerPoint laying out critical new evidence that had come to light in the past year. This included multiple letters from Sneed to his attorney expressing a desire to recant his testimony against Glossip. It also included the contents of a box of evidence belonging to the district attorney’s office, which was turned over to investigators in January. The box contained prosecutors’ handwritten notes revealing that after Van Treese’s murder, Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place.

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Drummond had highlighted Sneed’s misstatements in his brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial. “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.

“The state of Oklahoma can extract its pound of flesh from Richard Glossip, but I believe it has already extracted three pounds.”

Sneed lying about his diagnosis and prosecutors’ failure to correct the record were key factors for Rex Duncan, a former prosecutor whom Drummond retained to conduct the second investigation of Glossip’s conviction. Duncan was the last witness for the state. “This is a first for me, to agree with the defense attorney that their client deserves clemency,” he said. After 600 hours spent reviewing the case, Duncan said, he concluded that “Richard Glossip did not receive a fair trial and the state of Oklahoma cannot stand behind his conviction. Further, the state of Oklahoma cannot stand behind an execution given what has been discovered.”

“If anybody deserved to be on death row, it’s Justin Sneed,” Duncan said. “Richard Glossip has been on death row for most of his adult life, has been served his last meal three times and been within minutes of execution. The state of Oklahoma can extract its pound of flesh from Richard Glossip, but I believe it has already extracted three pounds.”

Donna Van Treese, the widow of Barry Van Treese, speaks after the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Richard Glossip clemency on April 26, 2023.

Photo: Doug Hoke/The Oklahoman

Enough Is Enough

When it was time for the Van Treese family to speak, their message was clear: They wanted their ordeal to be over and felt betrayed by the state’s call for clemency. Donna Van Treese, Barry’s widow, echoed her testimony from Glossip’s 2014 clemency hearing, describing the impact of her husband’s murder and the lasting trauma for her children. “We do not feel justly represented today,” she told the board. Barry’s son, Derek Van Treese, decried the years of investigation and publicity that had made Glossip’s case famous. “This case has been pushed from being a legal matter to being a political issue; has been pushed from the court of law to the court of public opinion,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

“Today has been a travesty,” Van Treese’s sister, Alana Van Treese Mileto, said. While she acknowledged that Drummond’s concerns should be considered, “at the same time, this is so one-sided.” The state’s presentation “feels like a giant stab in the back, to be honest with you.”

Asked if Drummond’s office had contacted the family prior to the hearing, Donna Van Treese spoke indignantly of a phone conversation with the attorney general. Drummond told her that he believed Glossip was guilty, she said. In response, Drummond repeated what he had previously stated: His personal belief was that Glossip was guilty of “at least accessory after the fact” for his failure to tell detectives about statements Sneed made following the murder. “More likely than not he’s guilty of murder,” he said. “But I do not believe that the evidence presents that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” He maintained that the board should recommend clemency. “I believe it would be a grave injustice to allow the execution of a man whose trial was plagued by many errors.”

Glossip was given 20 minutes to speak on his own behalf. He spoke for less than three, appearing by Zoom from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He wore maroon prison scrubs, and his wrists were handcuffed together, making it difficult for him to raise his hand to be sworn in by the board chair. Glossip dabbed at his eyes with a tissue while delivering remarks he had prepared on sheets of white paper. He told the Van Treese family that he was sorry for everything they’d been through. And he thanked all the people who had supported him, including McDugle, Jackson, and Drummond.

Richard Glossip gives an interview from death row in the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”

Credit: Courtesy of Joe Berlinger; Screenshot: The Intercept

Unlike Glossip’s previous clemency hearing in 2014, where board members challenged his account of what happened the day Barry Van Treese died, this time the board asked no questions. Instead, they announced a 10-minute break to deliberate.

After several hours of careful, comprehensive presentations by advocates for Glossip and representatives of the state laying out all the reasons that clemency should be granted, the end was shockingly abrupt. Board members quickly announced their votes: two votes for clemency, followed by two votes against. Under the rules of the Pardon and Parole Board, a tie is weighted in favor of the no votes, meaning the default is denying clemency and blessing an execution.

The Van Treese family cheered, cried, and hugged upon hearing the vote, gathering before a line of TV cameras. Everyone else filed out of the room.

Knight, Glossip’s lawyer, vowed to pursue every remaining avenue to save his client’s life. On Wednesday afternoon, he filed an unopposed stay of execution with the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also challenging the makeup of the board, arguing that the fifth board member, Smothermon, should have been replaced to avoid a tie that would result in a denial of clemency. Knight also plans to challenge the appellate court’s ruling dismissing Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction. Finally, he said, he would ask the governor for a reprieve to allow the legal process to take its course, “because the execution of an innocent man would be an irreversible injustice.”

In the meantime, Glossip faces the torment of yet another execution countdown. As his wife, Lea, told the board, they have already undertaken the excruciating task of planning for his state-sanctioned murder: deciding who will attend the execution, what Glossip will choose for his final meal, and where he will be buried. “He is now on the brink of his ninth execution date, all for a crime that he did not commit,” she said. “This ordeal has been absolutely psychologically terrorizing.”

Leaving the hearing, McDugle called the outcome “ridiculous.” “Oklahoma’s got some systemic problems with the judicial system,” he said. “Any reasonable person who would have been in that room would have voted yes for clemency.” Although McDugle has always maintained that he supports capital punishment, he reiterated what he has previously said about the case: If Glossip’s execution is carried out, “I will fight against the death penalty in the state of Oklahoma.”

The post Shocking Vote by Oklahoma Parole Board Clears the Way for Richard Glossip’s Execution appeared first on The Intercept.

“This court has thoroughly examined Glossip’s case from the initial direct appeal to this date,” the court’s five justices wrote. “Glossip has exhausted every avenue and we have found no legal or factual ground which would require relief in this case.”

The court’s move is a rebuke not only to the attorney general, who ordered a review of Glossip’s case earlier this year, but also to dozens of conservative Oklahoma legislators who have been fighting to stop Glossip’s execution over fears the state would kill an innocent man. The independent counsel who reviewed the case concluded that Glossip should receive a new trial — and that pushing for his execution did not “serve the interests of justice.”

Glossip was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but said it was all Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has always insisted on his innocence, and, over the last decade, evidence that he was wrongly convicted has steadily mounted.

Much of this evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed — a chronic drug user who demonstrated unpredictable bouts of violence — carried out the crime and only later set up Glossip as the mastermind. New witnesses have come forward to counter the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who took direction from Glossip, testifying that Sneed was cunning, manipulative, and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

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Most recently, the state disclosed evidence that Sneed made misstatements at trial that undermined his credibility. While he was in jail, Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium.

Drummond highlighted these misstatements in his brief to the court seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial. “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is pictured on Feb. 1, 2023, during an interview in Oklahoma City.

Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP

In rejecting Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, the court blithely concluded there was no reason to further stay Glossip’s execution. “Because Glossip has not made the requisite showing of likely success” in further appeals or “irreparable harm” from any denial of his claims, “he is not entitled to stay of execution,” the justices wrote.

“While I respect the Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion, I am not willing to allow an execution to proceed despite so many doubts,” Drummond said in a statement. “Ensuring the integrity of the death penalty demands complete certainty. I will thoroughly review the ruling and consider what steps should be taken to ensure justice.”

Glossip’s attorney Don Knight said it was “unconscionable for the court to attempt to force the state to move forward with this execution” given that the attorney general himself agreed that the state’s star witness had been discredited. “We cannot permit this longstanding injustice to go unchallenged and will be filing for review of this manifestly unjust ruling in the United States Supreme Court.”

In February, the Supreme Court intervened in another capital case, Escobar v. Texas, in which prosecutors’ arguments in favor of a death row defendant had been rejected by a similarly hostile appeals court. There, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ignored the Travis County district attorney’s decision to join the defendant in asking the court for a new trial. As in Glossip’s case, the prosecutor found that the original prosecution relied on an unsound foundation and that the conviction should be vacated. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the CCA “for further consideration in light of the confession of error by Texas.” Drummond cited the Escobar case in his filing with the Oklahoma court.

“We ask all Oklahomans who believe in justice to stand with Mr. Glossip, and the state of Oklahoma, to stop this wrongful judicial execution,” Knight said, “and grant Mr. Glossip the new trial he so rightly deserves.”

The post Oklahoma Court: We Want Richard Glossip Dead and Evidence Be Damned appeared first on The Intercept.

“The state has carefully considered the voluminous record in the case, the constitutional principles at stake, and the interests of justice,” Drummond wrote in a filing with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. “While the state has previously opposed relief for Glossip, it has changed its position based on a careful review of the new information that has come to light.”

The move by Drummond signals the possible end of a decadeslong saga that began on January 7, 1997, with the discovery of Barry Van Treese’s body inside Room 102 of a seedy motel on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.

Glossip, the live-in manager of the Best Budget Inn, was twice tried and sentenced to death for the murder of Van Treese, the motel’s owner. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to carrying out the brutal killing but said it was all Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has always insisted on his innocence, and over the last decade, evidence that he was wrongly convicted has steadily mounted.

The Intercept was the first national news outlet to thoroughly examine Glossip’s innocence claim. That investigation, published in 2015, brought widespread attention to the case and prompted a four-part docuseries by Joe Berlinger released in 2017. Last year, The Intercept’s coverage included exclusive interviews with key witnesses who were never contacted by police or prosecutors; the information they provided cast further doubt on Sneed’s account and bolstered Glossip’s innocence claim.

Glossip’s case also caught the attention of a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers, many of them rock-ribbed pro-death penalty conservatives, who became alarmed that the state planned to kill an innocent man. They sought out the law firm Reed Smith LLP, which conducted an independent investigation into the case. Since June 2022, the firm has released five reports, each containing bombshell revelations that paint a clear picture of Glossip’s wrongful conviction.

Yet until recently, it seemed unfathomable that the state of Oklahoma would concede that Glossip’s conviction was fatally flawed. Despite the ongoing revelations, courts and previous prosecutors refused to seriously consider the evidence pointing to his innocence. Things began to change course after Drummond took office in January. Almost immediately, Drummond slowed the state’s frenzied execution schedule and appointed special counsel to review Glossip’s case.

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The appointed counsel, Rex Duncan, ultimately concluded that Glossip’s conviction and sentence should be set aside. In a 19-page report, Duncan touched on problems with the case that Glossip’s attorneys have been trying to draw attention to for years — including the state’s repeated failure to turn over key evidence to the defense and its destruction of additional evidence that cast doubt on the already flimsy case.

“The state’s murder case against Glossip was not particularly strong and would have been, in my view, weaker if full discovery had been provided,” Duncan wrote.

Duncan found that Sneed, the state’s star witness, made misstatements at trial that undermined his credibility. While it has long been known that Sneed was a heavy drug user at the time of Van Treese’s murder, evidence only recently disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys revealed that while he was in jail, Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium. Both Duncan’s report and Drummond’s court filing highlight the significance of this misstatement, noting that Glossip’s attorneys should have been made aware of the full scope of Sneed’s diagnosis.

“There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in the court filing. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”

“The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” he wrote.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals, which has been unsympathetic to Glossip’s appeals for years, has little choice but to agree with Drummond that the case should be sent back to Oklahoma City for further consideration. The former elected district attorney there, David Prater, was particularly hostile to Glossip’s innocence claims and called efforts to stop his execution a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater has since retired and was recently replaced by Vicki Behenna, a former federal prosecutor and head of the Oklahoma Innocence Project.

In the meantime, Glossip’s execution date — his ninth — is still on the calendar for May 18. Drummond has joined Glossip’s attorney Don Knight in asking the court to grant a stay.

In a phone call, Knight was cautiously hopeful that the client he’s fought so tirelessly to save from execution may instead be freed. When he told Glossip that the attorney general had asked that his conviction be overturned, Glossip was “ecstatic,” Knight said. “It was like this moment washed over his face where he recognized that after all these years and after everything he’s been through, he was finally getting someone to listen to him.”

The post Oklahoma Attorney General Asks Court to Overturn Richard Glossip’s Conviction appeared first on The Intercept.

“Julie Bonds McCrory was my mother,” Chad said. “She was taken from me from a very early age. I’m 40 years old now.” Chad had no memory of the murder or his father’s 1985 trial. The crime had traumatized the tight-knit community of Andalusia, where Chad still lives, turning neighbors against Charles McCrory as soon as he became a suspect. But as long as Chad could remember, his father had insisted he was innocent — and most of his family believed him.

“I was raised by my grandparents,” Chad continued. “My dad’s parents. They loved my mom like their own child.” Although they supported Chad’s relationship with his incarcerated father, “they also encouraged me to make my own decision on supporting him.” As he got older, Chad said, he tried to keep an open mind about family members who believed McCrory was guilty. He spent hours talking to his maternal uncle, Barry Bonds, who consistently opposed his father’s release. Yet Chad said he was grateful for their time together. “I learned a lot of things about my mom growing up.” He could never get her back. But he hoped to reunite with his father before he died behind bars.

Chad’s wife and other family members watched the proceeding with a mix of attentiveness and resignation. “They’ve pretty much made up their minds,” Charles McCrory’s younger sister, Laura Grissett, said before the hearing began. “It feels just like a waste of time.” Although the board chair, former Birmingham prosecutor Leigh Gwathney, smiled encouragingly as Chad spoke, they knew better than to feel hopeful. The hearing had begun with a tense exchange between Gwathney and McCrory’s lawyer, Mark Loudon-Brown of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who reiterated a point he’d emphasized in McCrory’s parole application: that prosecutors in Covington County — the same office that convicted his client — had made clear that they no longer considered McCrory a threat to public safety.

“In April of 2021, the district attorney made Mr. McCrory an offer to time served that would have allowed him to leave court that very day and go home unsupervised,” Loudon-Brown said during his own two-minute presentation. The offer, which McCrory rejected because it came with the requirement that he admit to killing his wife, was made on the eve of an evidentiary hearing that would debunk the single most important piece of evidence that sent McCrory to prison for life: a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body.

Although a famed bite-mark analyst insisted at trial that the mark conclusively linked McCrory to the murder, that same expert has since recanted, saying he would never deliver such testimony today. In the years since McCrory was convicted, bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited as junk science. Nevertheless, the judge who presided over the evidentiary hearing was unmoved. He ruled against McCrory, keeping him locked up. McCrory is the last known defendant still imprisoned for a conviction almost entirely based on the faulty forensic practice.

Regardless of his client’s innocence claim, Loudon-Brown said, the offer from prosecutors reflected a belief that McCrory had been “sufficiently punished, that his release would be consistent with the safety of the community … and that his exemplary prison record justifies his release.” Gwathney bristled at this characterization. “Did the district attorney make those statements regarding his reasoning?” she asked pointedly. Wasn’t it possible he had different reasons for offering such a deal? Loudon-Brown conceded there were likely a number of reasons. But the offer still showed a willingness to free McCrory — the very question now before the parole board.

Gwathney’s posture made clear how she intended to vote. Under her tenure, the number of applicants granted parole has dropped precipitously. In Alabama, parole proceedings are cursory and notoriously stacked against incarcerated people, who are not even allowed to attend their own hearings. Yet in some ways, McCrory was luckier than most. Unlike the man whose case was called before his that morning, he had family members present, a legal advocate, and even the support of a retired Department of Corrections employee, who felt strongly enough to appear before the board in person. Retired after 35 years, she described McCrory as “a very skilled, very talented, and very intelligent person. I had no fears of him whatsoever.”

Chad was still speaking when the timer went off. “This has been the 12th parole board we’ve attended,” he said, urging the board to consider the many certificates his father had earned behind bars. Chad tried to make a final point: The prosecutors who made the plea offer were part of his community too; people he did business with, went to church with. “And I feel like —”

The bailiff stepped forward. “Your time is up,” he said.

Charles and Julie McCrory with their son, Chad.

Credit: Courtesy of Larry Grissett

Rush to Judgment

In 2022, The Intercept published a deep-dive investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing his long-standing claim of innocence. But the evidence pointing to his wrongful conviction was not discussed at the parole hearing. Maintaining innocence is rarely a winning strategy in front of parole boards, which expect contrition from the incarcerated people who appear before them. It’s the court system, theoretically at least, that is supposed to consider whether evidence supports a claim of innocence. When a trial judge rejects such a claim, as the Covington County judge did in McCrory’s case, then it falls to appellate courts to determine whether that was the right call.

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So far that has not helped McCrory either. The courts that have reviewed his conviction have willfully ignored the discredited forensic evidence at the heart of his case, dismissing the bite-mark expert’s recantation and going so far as to craft an entirely new narrative of the crime in order to keep McCrory in prison.

Julie McCrory’s body was found inside the couple’s house on the morning of May 31, 1985. She was lying prone, her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his crib. The police quickly zeroed in on McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair with a former co-worker. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives searched McCrory’s home and car and found nothing to connect him to the bloody crime. Police also found personal items that prosecutors sought to introduce at trial despite their lack of relevance to the crime: a VHS tape and a collection of photos featuring Julie and her husband in kinky scenarios. “There is more than one scene in which the young lady is — what is considered in bondage,” a defense witness testified at a pretrial hearing. The state apparently hoped to show that “bondage sex” could lead to “stronger and stronger acts of violence,” as one prosecutor put it. Although the items were barred by the presiding judge, rumors swirled in the run-up to the trial, and many came to believe that the murder was linked to some kind of sex ring.

According to the state’s star witness, the puncture wounds on Julie’s arm were a perfect match to McCrory’s unique dentition.

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence as dispositive of McCrory’s guilt: two small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which they concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s allegedly distinctive dentition.

The state rushed the case to trial in October 1985, but there was little else in the way of evidence. McCrory and his father had been the first to discover Julie’s body that morning; they’d gone to check on her after she failed to drop Chad off at his grandparents’ house. Police decided that McCrory was acting strangely when they arrived on the scene. Detective Billy Treadaway testified that McCrory asked him if Julie had been killed by a “lick on the back of her head,” which he found odd since her injuries had not yet been documented. Under cross-examination, Treadaway acknowledged that Julie was found with her head in a pool of blood but insisted, “You couldn’t see the lick on the back of the head. You could just see her head splattered open.”

The most important witness for the state was Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist who rose to fame after testifying during the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Even though Souviron had cautioned prosecutors early on against using the bite mark at McCrory’s trial absent other solid physical evidence, when he got on the stand, he was unequivocal, saying that the two puncture wounds on Julie’s arm were a perfect match to McCrory’s unique dentition — and only .5 percent of people in the world had dentition like McCrory’s.

The next day, the jury found McCrory guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison.

A Star Witness Recants

Bite-mark analysis depends on two assertions: that human dentition is unique and that skin is a suitable substrate to record that uniqueness. Neither is true; research has revealed that human dentition is not unique, and skin, as malleable as it is, is a poor medium for preserving an accurate record of injury. In recent years, the scientific community has repeatedly interrogated bite-mark analysis, deeming it a random and purely subjective practice. To date, more than two dozen people convicted on bite-mark evidence have been exonerated.

In 2020, Loudon-Brown and attorney Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project filed a petition with the court in Andalusia where McCrory was tried, asserting his innocence and asking that his conviction be overturned. They had powerful new evidence: Souviron had recanted his trial testimony. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim … could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual,” he wrote in an affidavit. “I therefore renounce that testimony.”

Circuit Judge Lex Short convened an evidentiary hearing the following spring. Two forensic odontologists, Adam Freeman and Cynthia Brzozowski, former true believers in bite-mark evidence, testified about the discipline’s demise and said there was no basis to conclude that the marks on Julie’s arm were made by teeth, let alone McCrory’s teeth.

More than two dozen people convicted on bite-mark evidence have been exonerated.

Covington County Chief Assistant District Attorney Grace Jeter did not call any experts to rebut Freeman and Brzozowski, but she dismissed Souviron’s recantation, suggesting that there was a difference between bite-mark analysis and “teeth-mark” analysis, and that Souviron had engaged in the latter. She told the judge that even without Souviron, the jurors could have taken the molds of McCrory’s teeth and photos of Julie’s injuries and made the comparison on their own.

Jurors aren’t “allowed to engage in their own junk science,” Loudon-Brown responded.

Short issued a brief ruling in February 2022, which parroted Jeter’s arguments and denied McCrory relief. The judge ignored Souviron’s recantation, found that Freeman and Brzozowski offered little more than a difference of opinion — what’s known as impeachment evidence — and agreed that jurors could have decided for themselves that the injury to Julie’s arm was inflicted by McCrory. Even without Souviron’s testimony, Short concluded, there was enough circumstantial evidence tying McCrory to the murder, such as his comment about the “lick” on Julie’s head, to uphold the jury’s verdict.

McCrory’s lawyers contested the ruling before the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Souviron’s opinion wasn’t merely challenged by other dentists, they noted, but wholly recanted. The discredited bite-mark analysis was the only evidence tying McCrory to the murder; without it, there was nothing to sustain his conviction.

The lawyers argued that police had failed to consider evidence that pointed away from McCrory, including hairs found clutched in Julie’s hand. And while there was physical evidence from the crime scene that could have been tested for DNA, it was subsequently destroyed by the state. Today, all that remains in the evidence room at the courthouse is the dental mold of McCrory’s teeth.

A photo taken by Dr. Richard Souviron shows the injury on Julie McCrory’s arm alongside Charles McCrory’s dental mold.

Photo: Courtesy of the Southern Center for Human Rights

Willful Ignorance

In its reply to the appeals court, the state, now represented by the attorney general’s office, amplified Short’s conclusions. It ignored Souviron’s recantation (save for a single reference to it as “alleged”) and leaned into the argument that McCrory’s challenge to his conviction was nothing more than a dispute over differing expert opinions amid the “shifting science” of bite-mark analysis.

The state also relied on a creative recasting of the facts.

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In her brief, Assistant Attorney General Kristi O. Wilkerson dismissed the allegation that the cops had failed to pursue evidence of an alternate suspect and spun circumstantial elements of the case, like the fact of McCrory’s affair, into an elaborate narrative that bore little resemblance to the testimony offered at trial. McCrory was “passionately in love” with the woman he’d had an affair with, desperate to sever ties with Julie, and turned to murder as the only way out. Julie’s death, she wrote, would solve all McCrory’s problems.

Wilkerson’s brief tried to make it appear that the case against McCrory was about everything but the alleged bite mark — a position that the trial prosecutor does not share. In an interview with Loudon-Brown after the 2021 evidentiary hearing, the prosecutor said the bite mark was “key” to the state’s case and “clearly” the basis of McCrory’s conviction.

“Her decision not to recuse jeopardized the partiality of the entire court.”

The state’s reframing of the issue apparently sat just fine with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied McCrory’s appeal in December. The opinion was mostly cribbed from the court’s denial of McCrory’s first appeal back in 1986 and quoted extensively from Short’s ruling. It, too, failed to acknowledge Souviron’s recantation and suggested that while there might be issues with bite-mark analysis, the same could not be said of “teeth-mark analysis.”

McCrory’s lawyers asked the court to reconsider its position. “This court erroneously split hairs regarding a pseudo-distinction between ‘bite marks’ and ‘teeth marks,’ wrongly concluding that Mr. McCrory’s petition is based on mere impeachment evidence that would not have changed the result of his trial,” they wrote. “An unrebutted and unimpeached recantation of critical expert testimony is not merely impeachment evidence — the evidence no longer exists.”

And there was a second problem: One of the appeals court judges, Elizabeth Kellum, had previously worked at the attorney general’s office and argued against McCrory’s 1986 appeal. “Judge Kellum signed the state’s brief in Mr. McCrory’s original appeal,” his lawyers wrote. “This creates an appearance of impropriety that, under the canons of judicial ethics, mandates recusal. Her decision not to recuse jeopardized the partiality of the entire court and violated Mr. McCrory’s constitutional rights.”

The court agreed to rehear the case, but instead of actually doing so, it merely removed Kellum’s name and reissued its previous opinion.

“When Judge Kellum was an assistant attorney general, she advocated for the state, against Mr. McCrory,” Loudon-Brown wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Her involvement as a judge hearing Mr. McCrory’s case after she litigated against him cannot be squared with the constitutional requirement that judges be impartial and objective decision makers.”

Loudon-Brown said that McCrory’s team will again ask the court to reconsider his case. If it declines, they will appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court.

Who Speaks for the Dead?

Outside the building where McCrory’s parole hearing took place, signs directed visitors to one of two doors. There was the “Victim Waiting Room” and the “Offender Waiting Room.” People like Chad — the victim’s son, who also supported his father — were assigned to the latter category.

The hearing room was similarly divided. On the left side, relatives who opposed parole sat alongside lawyers for the state. Also present was a representative of the nonprofit Victims of Crime and Leniency, or VOCAL, which attends all parole hearings and opposes release in every homicide case.

At around 9:30 a.m., Barry Bonds, Chad’s uncle, stood to address the board. “I am here to protest Charles McCrory’s release,” he said. “It’s a very long story, and I can’t get it all in in the time that I have.” As Julie’s youngest brother, Bonds said, he once looked up to McCrory, who was an EMT and auxiliary police officer. “He got me involved in the Andalusia Rescue Squad.” But then he pivoted, invoking the rumors that had swirled around McCrory’s trial. “There was a lot of wife-swapping, a lot of sex stuff going on in the community,” he said, without elaborating.

“The one thing that has stuck in my mind for many years,” Bonds went on, was the statement McCrory made at the scene: “‘Did the blow to the back of her head kill her?’ Only someone that was there would ask that question.” If McCrory would simply confess to the crime, Bonds suggested, he might still be able to “spend eternity in heaven.”

“I am the voice of Julie. … I never had the opportunity to know her.”

The next speaker was VOCAL Director Janette Grantham. Although she said she’d been asked by Julie’s family not to oppose parole for McCrory, she took it upon herself to speak anyway. “I am the voice of Julie,” she said. “I never had the opportunity to know her. But I’m sure if she had the opportunity to be here today, she would tell you she did not want to die.” McCrory had been convicted and sentenced to life by a jury of 12 people, Grantham said, therefore he should remain in prison. This was what his victim deserved. “And she deserves to have her voice heard today.”

There were two prosecutors representing the state. Nayla Contreras, of the attorney general’s office, reminded the board that parole is “a privilege and not a right.” The fact that someone “is doing exceptionally well in prison” does not mean they should be released. McCrory was behind bars because of acts he chose to commit, she said, things he’s never owned up to. “Yes, 40 years is quite a long time to serve in prison. But I would submit to the board this morning that 40 years is a long time to be in a grave as well.”

Finally, there was Nikki Stephens, an assistant district attorney in Covington County. “I’m honored to speak today on behalf of and for Julie McCrory’s family,” she said. She quickly rehashed the evidence the state had presented ad nauseam: McCrory’s “salacious affair”; the brutality of the murder and extent of Julie’s injuries, which she described in graphic detail; and finally, McCrory’s incriminating statement. “And I quote: ‘Was it the lick to the back of the head that killed her?’”

Stephens disputed Loudon-Brown’s characterization of the state’s rationale for offering a plea deal in 2021. The real reason was that the case was at a “particular posture at that point,” she explained. “I don’t know that, if the conviction were overturned, we would be able to retry the case because of witness issues.” Many of the people involved in the investigation were deceased, Stephens explained. She made no mention of the state’s star witness, Souviron, who is very much alive.

After a few minutes of deliberation with the sole other board member in attendance (a former state trooper), Gwathney, the board chair, announced their decision. Parole was denied. “It is also the unanimous decision of the board that parole will be reconsidered in five years,” she said, prompting the bailiffs to see everyone out.

It had stopped raining when Chad and his group got outside. They gathered in a circle while Loudon-Brown explained his team’s next steps. They would keep fighting in the courts, he said. A few minutes later, the group was asked to clear the sidewalk leading to the parking lot. Shortly afterward, Bonds emerged from the building flanked by security staff, who escorted him to his car. The implication that Bonds needed protection from the rest of the family angered Grissett, McCrory’s sister. In the eyes of the state, Bonds’s opposition to freeing McCrory made him the only victim that counted. “Chad has never been treated as a victim,” she said.

The post His Conviction Relied on Debunked Bite-Mark Science. Why Is He Still Locked Up? appeared first on The Intercept.

Rojo Bushnell was sitting in a Huddle House diner down the street from the prison. She’d been there all day with Megan Crane, co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Missouri office, working on Taylor’s case. Rojo Bushnell realized that as she was waiting on hold, the execution was already underway. At 6:16 p.m. Taylor was pronounced dead.

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Taylor was executed for the 2004 murder of his girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three young children in Jennings, a suburb of St. Louis. Taylor had always maintained his innocence. He was nearly 2,000 miles away when the bodies were found inside the home he shared with Rowe, shot in the head. Police seized on Taylor as their sole suspect, pursuing witnesses to confirm their theory of the crime while ignoring evidence to the contrary. At Taylor’s trial, the prosecution relied on a dubious statement provided by Taylor’s brother, Perry — a statement Perry had vociferously recanted — and on testimony from a medical examiner who dramatically changed his estimated time of death in order to implicate Taylor.

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Despite lingering questions over Taylor’s guilt, his innocence claim was never fully investigated nor considered by any court. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell declined to avail himself of a Missouri law that allows prosecutors to reopen possible wrongful convictions, saying there were no facts “to support a credible claim of innocence” in Taylor’s case. The office maintained its stance even as Taylor’s daughter, Deja, flew to St. Louis days before the execution to share crucial information supporting her father’s alibi, which could have confirmed that the victims were still alive several days after Taylor had left the state.

“They know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

As Taylor’s execution loomed, attorneys sought to stop it, asking Gov. Mike Parson to convene a Board of Inquiry: an independent panel tasked with vetting Taylor’s innocence claim. The governor declined to do so. As it became clear the execution would likely proceed, attorneys learned that the state was denying Taylor’s request to have a spiritual adviser and two witnesses, Rojo Bushnell and Crane, present during the execution.

After the Missouri Supreme Court and the federal district court in St. Louis declined to intervene, Rojo Bushnell and Crane were sitting in the diner working on an appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court. Rojo Bushnell was calling to tell Taylor about the appeal when she was informed that it was too late.

It is not the first time that Missouri has executed a person in the face of a compelling claim of innocence, nor is it the first time the state has executed someone while litigation was still pending. “I think that’s something we were all thinking about,” Rojo Bushnell said. “They know that people are continuing to litigate; they know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

During her last visit with Taylor on Tuesday morning, Rojo Bushnell talked to him about his love of music. His favorite song, he told her, was The O’Jays’ “Family Reunion.” Rojo Bushnell and Crane listened to the song as they drove from Bonne Terre back to St. Louis after the execution. Taylor, a devout Muslim, “accepted his fate, that whatever was Allah’s will was Allah’s will,” Rojo Bushnell said. “He was positive up to the last time I talked to him.”

Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty held rallies in support of Taylor across the state on Tuesday, from Kansas City to Bonne Terre. “One day the truth will be uncovered, and Raheem Taylor will be vindicated and posthumously exonerated,” the organization’s co-director Michelle Smith said.

“This is an undeniable and irreversible injustice,” Crane said. “But in the words of Raheem, he will ‘live eternally in the hearts of family and friends.’”

The post “An Irreversible Injustice”: Missouri Executes Leonard “Raheem” Taylor Despite Doubts Over His Guilt appeared first on The Intercept.

That Taylor made this trip is undisputed; what it means depends on who you believe. According to the state of Missouri, the trip was evidence that Taylor, then 40, was fleeing St. Louis after brutally murdering his 28-year-old girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three young children. According to Taylor, the trip was for business, but with a twist: He was planning to meet his 13-year-old daughter, Deja, for the first time. During the visit, both Deja and her mother, Taylor’s former girlfriend, say that Taylor called Rowe in St. Louis and put Deja on the phone to chat with one of Rowe’s daughters. In other words, in the days after Taylor boarded that westbound flight, Rowe and her children were very much alive.

Despite the discrepancy, Taylor was arrested two weeks later. He was tried on four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He has always maintained his innocence, arguing that police fixated on him as a suspect and ignored a compelling alibi supported by witness statements in favor of a theory in which he slaughtered his loved ones and then stayed at the crime scene for days before flying to California. The state’s case rested on Taylor’s brother, Perry, who was relentlessly harassed by police until he implicated his brother in the crime — and who recanted his statements long before Taylor’s 2008 trial. The state also relied on testimony from a medical examiner who changed his time-of-death estimate dramatically to support the state’s version of events.

“All they wanted was SOMEBODY to heap these crimes on,” Taylor wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Even if it was the wrong SOMEBODY.”

Nevertheless, Missouri is scheduled to execute Taylor on February 7. All of Taylor’s appeals have been denied, leaving open a host of unanswered questions and doubts about his guilt. His efforts to avail himself of a Missouri law that allows prosecutors to reopen possible wrongful convictions have been rebuffed by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell. Although the Missouri Supreme Court denied a request to stay Taylor’s execution, the Midwest Innocence Project has asked Gov. Mike Parson to intervene and conduct an inquiry into the case. The lawyers “have grave concerns that Missouri is going to execute an innocent man,” they wrote in their request to the governor. Without such an inquiry, “Leonard Taylor will be executed without a single factfinder ever reviewing the evidence of his actual innocence.”

Leonard Taylor and Angela Rowe before Rowe’s murder in 2004.

Photo: Courtesy of Kent Gipson

A Horrifying Scene

Angela Rowe’s family was worried. It was Friday, December 3, and no one had talked to her in several days. They called her children’s school and were told the kids hadn’t been there all week. That raised alarms, her older sister Gerjuan recalled; Rowe’s kids — 10-year-old Alexus, 6-year-old Acqreya, and 5-year-old Tyrese — never missed school. The police arrived at Rowe’s home in Jennings, just outside the St. Louis city limits, to check on the family around 6 p.m. The front of the house was dotted with Christmas decorations. Editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were rolled up in plastic bags on the lawn, and mail had accumulated behind the storm door.

Inside, police confronted a horrifying scene. Rowe’s three children were lying on the four-postered bed in the back bedroom, fully dressed, a comforter pulled over them; they’d each been shot in the head. A TV in the room was blaring loudly. In the front bedroom was Rowe, also clothed and under a blanket. She too had been shot in the head. The air conditioning was set at around 50 degrees. Joseph Lebb, an investigator from the medical examiner’s office, reported that Rowe’s body was in rigor mortis — a stiffening of the muscles that generally takes hold not long after death — and her core body temperature was just over 51 degrees. The bodies exhibited early signs of decomposition, Lebb reported. Outside, Gerjuan told Lebb that she’d last seen Rowe the previous Saturday, November 27, when Rowe came over to lend her $50.

The next morning, medical examiner Phillip Burch performed the autopsies. Based on “the condition of the bodies,” Rowe and her children had likely been murdered at least a day — and no more than a week — before they were found, he told defense lawyers during a 2006 deposition. He was most confident, he said, that the family had died sometime during the week of November 29.

Police quickly latched on to Leonard Taylor, Rowe’s live-in boyfriend, as their main suspect. The night the bodies were found, Gerjuan asked the cops whether Taylor was inside the house, and police reports indicate that various members of Rowe’s family said that her relationship with Taylor was not without its struggles.

Taylor had a criminal record and a history of violence. He’d done time in California for rape and was accused in 2000 of raping his 16-year-old stepdaughter. He was also a seasoned drug dealer who trafficked cocaine across the country, amassing a string of aliases and fraudulent IDs. Still, the state never offered a cogent motive to explain the vicious and cold-blooded crime.

Taylor had overlapping intimate relationships that followed the path of his illicit business dealings, which earned him the nickname “Cass” — short for Casanova. While Taylor was involved with Rowe, he also had a wife in California and a girlfriend in Kentucky.

Among his past partners was Mia Perry, Deja’s mother, who he became involved with in the late 1980s. In 1991, the same year that Deja was born, Taylor was popped for drug dealing and sentenced to time in federal prison; he never got to meet his baby daughter. While inside, Taylor told the Kansas City Star, he “hooked up with some cats that were on some corporate stuff, doing corporate check fraud.” Upon his release, Taylor began a short-lived career in white-collar crime, which landed him in Missouri state prison.

Rowe, the younger sister of Taylor’s former neighbor in St. Louis, visited him often while he was incarcerated. When he was released in 2002, Taylor re-upped his cross-country drug trade, staying with Rowe when he was in town. In the summer of 2004, Taylor, Rowe, and the kids moved into the house in Jennings. Rowe had Taylor’s name tattooed on her arm. Around the home, there were pictures of the smiling couple and love notes Rowe had written. The move was a relief, according to Taylor, because he’d recently had a drug deal go bad with the notoriously violent Gangster Disciples, who operated in St. Louis and southern Illinois. Meanwhile, he’d also gotten a lead on his long-lost daughter, Deja, whom he ultimately tracked down in California just days after Thanksgiving.

During their reunion, Taylor called back home to St. Louis to share the news with Rowe. Taylor had plans to bring Deja out to St. Louis and wanted her to chat with Rowe and 10-year-old Alexus. The following Monday, Taylor boarded a Greyhound bus carrying a kilo of cocaine and headed back east on business, he told the KC Star. On December 9, Taylor was arrested in Kentucky for the murders of Rowe and her children.

Angela Rowe’s children Tyrese, left; Alexus, middle; and Acqreya, right.

Photo: Courtesy of Kent Gipson

No Other Suspects

Eight hours after the bodies were found, at 2:15 a.m. on December 4, Perry Taylor got a phone call from a St. Louis police detective. Perry, who has since died, worked as a truck driver for Gainey Transportation Services, which sent him all over the country hauling freight. He spent so much time on the road that he’d moved out of his St. Louis apartment earlier that year, storing his belongings at the home his brother shared with Rowe. Perry’s truck had everything he needed for the most part, including a TV and DVD player. On the rare nights he spent in St. Louis, he parked in a lot behind the house and slept in his truck.

Perry was spending the night south of Atlanta when he got the call. It’s unclear from the record whether police were the first to inform him that Rowe and her children had been shot to death. But according to a police report, a detective asked Perry if he knew where his younger brother was. Perry said Taylor was probably in California. He estimated that it had been about a month since they’d spoken. Asked about his brother’s relationship with Rowe, Perry said it had been strong, as far as he knew. According to the report, the detective hung up and immediately called local police in Georgia, who descended on the truck stop where Perry was staying, hoping to find Taylor in his rig. But he wasn’t there.

Undeterred, St. Louis detectives continued to track Perry, using GPS coordinates provided by the trucking company. Upon learning that he was scheduled to make a delivery in New Jersey, three detectives flew in to meet him. They found Perry at a truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. According to their report, they took him to a local police station, where they asked him again when he last spoke to his brother. When Perry recalled the conversation taking place in early November — his brother had called about a rap show in Alabama, he said — detectives said they had records that showed otherwise. They also asked if Taylor had a gun. Perry said it wouldn’t surprise him, given his brother’s lifestyle. “He dresses fancy and wanted to hang out with rappers,” Perry said, according to the report. The detectives asked if Perry had given Taylor a ride. No, Perry said, adding that they were free to look for fingerprints in his rig.

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On December 8, detectives finally got what they wanted from Perry. He had just arrived back in St. Louis when they stopped him at a gas station off Highway 70. They arrested him, took him to the Jennings police station, and asked him to give a videotaped statement. In the video, Perry sits in front of two white detectives wearing a dark blue hoodie, glasses, and a pair of handcuffs, which are eventually removed. The original video, which was more than three hours long, was later edited into several brief clips totaling less than eight minutes. Jurors would only see the shortened version. In the first clip, which starts around 11 p.m., Perry is asked again when he last talked to his brother. “The last time I spoke with him was the night he told me he did that,” he says.

Perry said Taylor had called him asking for money because he had to “get away.” When Perry asked why, he said, “I killed Angela.” At first he thought his brother was joking, Perry said, but then Taylor told him that Rowe had come at him with a knife. He also said something about killing her children, though Perry could not say precisely what. “He either said ‘I’m gonna kill the kids too’ or ‘I killed the kids.’ And I don’t remember which one he said.” In another clip, recorded close to 1 a.m., Perry struggles to tell the police when, exactly, that phone conversation took place. “He already told you before Thanksgiving what had happened, right?” one detective prompts him. “Yeah,” Perry says. “Was that the day before? Two days before?” Perry pauses, hesitating, saying he really isn’t sure. “If I had to guess, I would say it was on the day before.”

“Anything I told the police in that video was all coerced, sir, every fucking word of it.”

In a pre-trial deposition three years later, Perry angrily insisted that he had been coerced into giving the statements against his brother. From the moment they first found him in Atlanta, he told lawyers on both sides, the police had verbally and physically abused him, pulling him out of his truck, and punching, kicking, and threatening him. In New Jersey, they ransacked his truck, destroying his TV and DVD player and leaving black fingerprint dust everywhere, then locked him up at the local jail. On the day he finally gave the statement implicating his brother, he said, police had surrounded him with weapons drawn, forcing him into a police car. “And some detective right off the bat told me, ‘OK, before we get to the station, here’s what you’re going to say.’”

Perry recalled the cops threatening that if he didn’t say what they wanted, they would hurt his mother, who was disabled and lived on the fifth floor of her building. “It would be a shame if something was to happen to her, like she was to fall out the window,” he remembered one officer saying. The police told him what to say, rehearsed it with him, and made him repeat it on tape, he said. “Anything I told the police in that video was all coerced, sir, every fucking word of it, it was all bullshit.”

The conduct by police ultimately cost him his job and everything he owned, Perry told the attorneys. His truck was impounded, and he was unable to retrieve any of his belongings from Rowe’s house. “The police told me I could not go and get any of my shit, they didn’t give a damn what happened to it.” But what angered him most was how they mistreated his mother. “She’s never had so much as a parking ticket. And for the police to go to my mom’s house and harass her the way they did and threaten her the way they did … that’s the kind of shit that makes you hate law enforcement.”

Perry repeatedly insisted that Taylor was innocent. “My brother ain’t capable of that bullshit. I don’t believe in my heart that he did it. You fucking people look at his criminal record, looked at his past and his background, and you fucking went on a witch hunt, you ain’t considered no other suspects,” he said.

Nevertheless, one year later, Perry’s videotaped statements would become the state’s primary evidence against Taylor at trial.

An undated photo of Leonard Taylor, who joined the Army after graduating high school in St. Louis.

Photo: Courtesy of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty

Rolling Back the Clock

Determining time of death is at best an inexact science. While shows like “Law and Order” feature pathologists and other crime-fighters who announce a precise time of death based on mere visual examination, figuring this out in real life is a trickier proposition. There are clues that pathologists often consider, like rigor mortis, lividity — the gravitational pooling of blood after death — body cooling, post-mortem insect activity, and putrefaction. But each physical change can depend on any number of other factors. Still, there is a reliable way to sort it out amid the corporeal uncertainties: If you know when somebody was last seen alive and when they were found dead, you can bet that time of death is somewhere in between.

Almost immediately, investigators had concrete information about when Rowe and her children were last seen alive. At the crime scene, Rowe’s sister Gerjuan said that Rowe had visited her on Saturday, November 27. Beverly Conley, one of the children’s aunts, said she got a call from Alexus around midnight on Saturday; it stood out because Alexus never called her so late and she sensed anxiety in the child’s voice. In the background, she said, she could hear arguing. Sherry Conley, another aunt, said that she spoke on the phone to both Alexus and Acqreya around noon on Saturday. Sherry also told police that she talked to Rowe on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. to discuss plans for the children to stay with her the following weekend, starting December 3. She could hear the kids playing in the background and heard Alexus shout out that she was excited about the visit. Finally, a neighbor named Elmer Massey, whose daughter regularly played with Rowe’s kids, told police that he’d seen Rowe and her children over the weekend, and that at some point during the week of November 29, he’d seen a Black man looking out from behind Rowe’s storm door.

Despite these consistent accounts, police reports don’t reveal any efforts by investigators to figure out what happened after November 28 — the last day that witnesses report having talked to Rowe and the kids. At trial, prosecutors rolled back the clock instead, leaning into Perry’s videotaped statement and arguing that Taylor murdered Rowe and the children in the wee hours of November 24, then remained in the house until he flew to California on the morning of November 26.

“These are people just making honest mistakes.”

In pressing this alternate timeline, the state had a strong ally: medical examiner Phillip Burch. Burch, who died in 2014, had previously said that the most likely time of death was within days of the bodies being found on December 3, and no more than a week beforehand — a window that would exclude Taylor. But at trial Burch changed his story, claiming that he hadn’t taken into account the air conditioner being set at 50 degrees (even though he had mentioned the temperature during his deposition). With that in mind, he testified that Rowe and the children could have been killed up to three weeks before they were found. The expanded timeline caught the defense flat-footed; they hadn’t retained their own pathology expert to testify on Taylor’s behalf.

The state bolstered this narrative with testimony from a reluctant witness, an ex-girlfriend of Perry’s named Betty Byers, who made clear on the stand that she did not want to be there. She said that Perry had called her the day before Thanksgiving; when she asked how Taylor was doing, he replied, “You don’t want to know what he did.” She answered, “What he do, kill somebody?” Yes, Perry said. “He killed Angie and the kids.” The next day, Byers testified, she saw Perry in person and overheard a phone call between him and his brother in which it became clear that Taylor was still at Rowe’s home with the bodies. “Man, what the fuck you still doing there?” she heard Perry say.

It’s unclear how many times Byers spoke to detectives. But police records show at least one of her interviews was recorded on a DVD alongside that of another witness who had a similarly incriminating account — and whose interview was accidentally erased, according to police. In fact, the case record shows that at least five videotaped interviews — including with key witnesses — were destroyed, all of them unintentionally, according to the state.

The state sought to undermine the witnesses who contradicted its timeline. Alan Key, one of the prosecutors, argued that Rowe’s neighbor, Massey, had gotten his dates confused — he’d actually seen the man, who Key insisted was Taylor, a week earlier. “It’s silly” to think otherwise, Key told the jury.

The prosecution brought in a representative of the company Rowe used for her home phone line to testify that there weren’t records of the calls that Gerjuan and the Conleys said they had with Rowe and the kids. That witness failed to mention that the company, Charter Communications, had a disclaimer regarding its phone records: The company “DOES NOT keep or have records for every incoming or outgoing call made or received by our telephone subscribers,” it read. This significant caveat wouldn’t come out until after the trial.

In his closing argument, Key told the jury that Perry Taylor had the facts straight, while Gerjuan and the Conleys were deluded. Gerjuan had substance abuse problems, he said, and Sherry and Beverly, overcome by grief, were understandably confused, their memories unreliable. “These are people just making honest mistakes,” he said.

A newspaper on the lawn of Angela Rowe’s home in a crime scene photograph taken by police on Dec. 3, 2004.

Photo: Courtesy of Kent Gipson

Another Victim

Deja Taylor was in her late teens when her father was sent to death row. At first, she didn’t know what had happened; no sooner had she met him than he disappeared from her life again. Nor did her father’s attorneys track her down so that she could share her recollection of his visit to California. It was not until November 2022, when she was 31 years old, that she gave a declaration that could have been critical to his case. It described the visit with her father on Thanksgiving weekend in 2004, the phone call with Rowe and her daughter, and the plans they had made for her to visit St. Louis. “Angela seemed very excited to meet me and I was excited as well,” she said. “I was so happy to connect with my father and his new family that I cried quite a bit that day.”

 “I live in constant fear of his possible execution and have no idea what I will do without my father.”

“Finding out that my father was back in prison, and this time on death row, was very hard for me to deal with,” Deja said. She kept it to herself even as she reconnected with Taylor, communicating with him regularly in phone calls and letters. “My father is a constant source of positive support,” she said, giving her advice and helping her during painful periods, like when her grandmother died last year. “I was extremely close to my grandmother and completely devastated by her death, but my dad helped me get through the grieving process,” she said. Now she was terrified that she would soon lose him too. “I live in constant fear of his possible execution and have no idea what I will do without my father in my life.”

On February 3, Deja flew to St. Louis expecting to meet with County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell. Advocates for Taylor had asked for a meeting so that Deja could share her account. A relatively new Missouri law allows elected prosecutors to intervene in possible wrongful convictions, but earlier in the week, Bell had issued a statement saying that there were no facts “to support a credible claim of innocence” in Taylor’s case. Confusingly, on the same day, Bell’s office also wrote a letter to the Missouri Supreme Court, saying that it supported Taylor’s efforts to delay his execution in order to give his attorneys additional time to investigate his innocence claim.

Deja was accompanied by Midwest Innocence Project Executive Director Tricia Rojo Bushnell. When they arrived at the office, however, Bell was nowhere to be found. Instead, an investigator appeared and told them that he would be interviewing Deja alone; he would not allow Rojo Bushnell to accompany her. The investigator did not ask questions, simply listening as Deja spoke. “She did not feel hopeful about their role afterwards,” Rojo Bushnell said.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Bell denied that Deja was ever told she would meet with the prosecuting attorney. And he suggested that Deja had not done enough to prove her father’s alibi. “She either has probative evidence or not. We encourage her to finally come forward so that we can evaluate any potential evidence she has.”

Taylor’s predicament — that he’s so close to execution without his claim of innocence being thoroughly vetted — is emblematic of a criminal legal system that routinely ignores its own failures. The Midwest Innocence Project’s request for the governor to convene an independent panel to investigate the case, known as a Board of Inquiry, is an extraordinary and unusual action that amplifies the case’s sprawling failures. “Leonard Taylor, throughout every level of his state and federal proceedings, has had the misfortune of being represented by ineffective counsel who did little, if any, investigation on his behalf and, as a result, failed to appropriately litigate his claims or present his actual innocence,” the lawyers wrote.

To Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Smith argues that Taylor’s post-conviction attorneys put too much faith in Bell and his promises to correct past wrongs. Bell’s persona as a progressive prosecutor did not mean he would automatically intervene in Taylor’s case, she said. “There was too much trust put into what a progressive prosecutor is supposed to be in St. Louis County, which is not the reality.”

For Deja, who visited her father after he was transferred to the prison where he is scheduled to die Tuesday evening, Taylor’s execution will make her another victim in the case. “I know that he has had his day in court and the jury found him guilty,” she said. “But the legal system seems blind to the impact that his death will have on innocent loved ones.”

Update: February 7, 2023
On Monday, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson denied clemency to Leonard “Raheem” Taylor and rejected a request for a Board of Inquiry to review Taylor’s claims of innocence, which Parson called “self-serving.” The governor announced that the state would go through with Taylor’s execution as planned. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected Taylor’s final appeal and the state attorney general denied his request for a spiritual adviser to be present during his execution. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, Taylor will be executed at 6 p.m. CST on Tuesday.

The post Will Missouri Execute an Innocent Man? appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, the court granted the motion, rescheduling seven executions and postponing 13 additional dates well into the future. Two days later, Drummond announced that he had appointed an independent prosecutor to reinvestigate Glossip’s case. For Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight, who has fought for years to save his client’s life, it was a banner week in a case that has become synonymous with the state’s dysfunctional death penalty system. “From the beginning of our work on this case, all we have asked for is a fair review of all the evidence,” Knight said in a statement. “The new evidence we have uncovered since 2015 shows conclusively … that no reasonable juror who viewed all the evidence would find Mr. Glossip guilty of murder for hire. We are confident that this new investigation will reach the same conclusion. Richard Glossip is innocent of this crime.”

Glossip, who was scheduled for execution on February 16, had already filled out the paperwork for witnesses and burial plans when news of the investigation arrived — a ritual he has undertaken multiple times. He is now set to die on May 18. Amid mounting pressure from Oklahoma lawmakers, however, it seems vanishingly unlikely that this new execution date — his ninth so far — will come to pass.

Drummond, who was sworn in on January 9, inherited Oklahoma’s execution spree from his predecessor, John O’Connor, who made executions a top priority during his short stint in office. Appointed in the summer of 2021 to finish the term of Michael Hunter, who was tasked with overhauling the state’s execution protocol before resigning amid a personal scandal, O’Connor immediately requested a slew of death warrants even as a lawsuit over the state’s new lethal injection protocol was pending in federal court. After the court upheld the protocol last June — despite evidence that the condemned have suffered when executed using the contested set of drugs — the state moved to set 25 execution dates.

Drummond’s intervention so soon after taking office caught many Oklahomans by surprise, including activists, attorneys, and people on death row. The previous schedule had set a pace of roughly one execution per month, which would have eliminated half the state’s condemned population within two years. The new schedule puts 60 days between each execution, reducing the number of remaining executions this year from 10 to four. Yet for those whose cases have not drawn the same public attention as Glossip’s, the order provides little more than temporary relief. One man whose execution will be postponed said that his date was not close enough to cause a lot of stress, although he had already begun to prepare psychologically for his execution. “There was the ‘ticking off of last things’ and that was a bummer — last World Series, last Thanksgiving, stuff like that,” he wrote. “Now, I have to begin anew.”

Anti-death penalty activists in New York City hold a vigil for Oklahoma death row prisoner Julius Jones on Nov. 18, 2021.

Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Unacceptable Risks

The news in Oklahoma came as other active death penalty states announced that they would halt executions altogether to reevaluate their killing protocols. In Tennessee, where the execution of Oscar Smith was called off at the last minute in April, an investigation recently revealed that prison officials had run afoul of their own protocol since executions resumed in the state in 2018. In Arizona, whose record of botched executions carried into 2022, newly elected Gov. Katie Hobbs announced plans to appoint a death penalty independent review commissioner “to review and provide transparency” into the state’s protocols. Arizona’s new attorney general vowed not to seek any execution dates while the review was underway.

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Yet Oklahoma’s own recent history shows how tenuous and short-lived such de facto moratoriums can be. The state’s death chamber was inactive for six years following a series of disastrous executions that made national headlines. In 2015, Oklahoma nearly executed Glossip using the wrong drug, reversing course at the last minute and sparking a series of investigations that uncovered myriad problems with the way the state carried out capital punishment. In 2017, a bipartisan commission issued a nearly 300-page report critiquing every aspect of the state’s system. The report’s co-chairs expressed hope that the study would “foster an informed discussion among all Oklahomans about whether the death penalty in our state can be implemented in a way that eliminates the unacceptable risk of executing the innocent, as well as the unacceptable risks of inconsistent, discriminatory, and inhumane application of the death penalty.”

Yet virtually nothing changed. In the years following the review, the state remained mired in controversy as it moved to resume executions. John Grant, the first man put to death, convulsed and vomited on the gurney during his 2021 execution. Officials accused witnesses of exaggerating what they saw. Later that year, Julius Jones, a Black man sentenced to die by a nearly all-white jury compromised by racial bias, came within hours of execution despite an activist movement proclaiming his innocence. Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted his sentence to life. In other cases, issues like untreated mental illness, severe childhood trauma, and questionable convictions have been brushed aside in order to put people to death.

Nevertheless, due largely to Glossip’s case, even staunch supporters of the death penalty have begun to question Oklahoma’s system. Last fall, after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused to consider new evidence pointing to Glossip’s innocence — including exculpatory evidence destroyed by police between his first and second trials — state Rep. Kevin McDugle wrote a scathing op-ed in The Oklahoman, warning that such a system posed a threat to anyone who might find themselves wrongfully accused. “Oklahoma has a sad history of pushing cases through the full judicial process and declaring them final and over, only to have many convicted men later exonerated when DNA evidence proved their innocence,” he wrote. “Undeniably, this system has failed before; we cannot insist everything is fine just because we went through the process. Who will take responsibility for this travesty?”

“Who will take responsibility for this travesty?”

Indeed, while the same court granted the attorney general’s request to slow down executions, such willingness to intervene in carrying out the death penalty is an exception for the judges, not the rule. Judge Gary Lumpkin made clear that he was reluctant to go along with the order, grousing in a concurrence that the “major complaint in the application of the death penalty is the amount of time it takes to complete the carrying out of the sentence to provide finality for crime victims and their families.” Now the DOC was asking for even more time with “no more than a claim of inconvenience.”

The death penalty’s application has always hinged more on political will than a meaningful approach to crime, subject to the whims and priorities of whoever is in power at a given time. It’s no coincidence that the slowdown in executions comes not only at the hands of a new attorney general, but also at the behest of newly appointed Department of Corrections Director Steven Harpe, who worked as an executive for the governor’s mortgage company before joining his administration — and has no background in prisons or punishment. Nor is it any secret that executions take a toll on those who are tasked with carrying them out.

For activists who have fought the relentless tide of executions since 2021, the impact on prison personnel has become abundantly clear during visits to the state penitentiary in McAlester. Sue Hosch, the Oklahoma coordinator of Death Penalty Action, who regularly visits and corresponds with men on death row, said that guards who work at the prison are among the unseen individuals who are adversely impacted every time a human being is put to death. The men on death row “have a system of people they’re involved with — family, friends, loved ones, both inside and outside the prison,” Hosch said. “It hurts to see these people executed one after another like they’re meaningless people in the world, because they’re not.”

The post Oklahoma Slows Down Frenzied Execution Spree and Launches Probe Into Richard Glossip Case appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s not a good day for everybody, but it was a good day for victims,” said the Cantrells’ 47-year-old grandson, Justin Wyatt. He did not know whether the execution had brought justice or closure. “I do know that I’m glad that our enemy is dead.” Debra Wyatt, his mother, rejected the notion of closure. “I don’t like people to use that word to me. Because the only way that we would ever have closure is if they came back to us — and we know that’s not gonna happen on this earth.” The Cantrells’ nephew Johnny Melton urged society to address the factors that lead to fatal violence, like mental health problems and domestic abuse. He said he prayed for Eizember’s family. “It is our understanding that he has adult children … and we recognize that they are victims today too.”

Families of the people Oklahoma puts to death are not given a platform to speak. While a victim services representative accompanied the Cantrells’ loved ones, 25-year-old Emily Eizember sat in the car with her father’s attorneys. The three witnessed the execution together. From the gurney, Eizember had mouthed “I love you” to his daughter. Afterward, they drove past the protesters to a budget hotel, where Eizember’s 29-year-old son, Allen, was waiting to give his younger sister a hug. He’d wanted to attend the execution but missed the deadline to get on the witness list. Officials would not let him come inside the prison to say goodbye.

Eizember, who turned 62 just before his execution, was mostly estranged from his children in the nearly 18 years he lived on death row. But in December, Emily had traveled to McAlester to visit her father for the first and last time. She decided to attend the execution “to ensure that my dad’s last breaths were taken in peace,” as she wrote in a text message on her way home. She decried the death penalty as inhumane. “I had that opinion before watching my father’s execution this morning,” but it was even clearer to her now. People who commit such crimes should be in prison, “not strapped to a table at the mercy of another man.” Still, she wrote, “it was nice to see my dad one last time, for he is loved and many on death row are!!!”

For many relatives of the condemned, seeing a loved one before their execution can be prohibitively expensive. Emily’s December visit had been coordinated by Death Penalty Action, which supports death row families, as well as Eizember’s spiritual adviser, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood. Eizember had made clear to Hood that reconciling with his children could bring him measure of solace that would otherwise remain out of reach. He carried a lot of rage, which he sometimes wielded against his own advocates and loved ones. Yet Eizember was also an important part of the death row community, according to Sue Hosch, the Oklahoma coordinator for Death Penalty Action. “When new people come in, he is one of the ones who helps get them kind of settled,” she said.

“I believe that everybody that saw that execution is gonna be traumatized.”

The days preceding the execution might have been a time when Hood could focus on helping Eizember shed some of his anger and prepare to die. Instead, he’d been embroiled in a lawsuit to force the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to allow him to carry out his duty as Eizember’s clergy of record. Under the state’s execution protocol, spiritual advisers are allowed to stand inside the execution chamber to accompany the condemned. But in early January, the department had tried to bar Hood from the space on the grounds that he was a security threat. On the eve of the execution, the department backed down. But the victory was bittersweet. “I feel good about it,” Hood told me. “But then I’m like, ‘OK, great. You get to watch someone die.’”

Around 10:35 a.m., Hood approached a small wooden podium outside the prison. In a long black robe and round tortoiseshell glasses, he was smiling but subdued, his easy Georgia drawl more muted than usual. Media witnesses described him as shaking inside the execution chamber, but now he was composed, searching for words to describe what he had seen. He kept coming back to “bizarre.” It was bizarre to watch somebody go from a “perfectly healthy human being to a dead human being” in a matter of minutes. He’d watched as Eizember’s face turned purple, as his breath became labored, as he appeared to gurgle, an image he wanted to push out of his mind.

“I believe that everybody that saw that execution is gonna be traumatized,” Hood said. “It’s pointless. Scott was not a threat to anybody.” The execution left him grappling with a feeling of complicity. “There was all of this fight to get me in there,” he said. Now he was questioning whether he had become part of the system he wished to dismantle.

Rev. Jeff Hood speaks to a gathering of protesters on Jan. 12, 2023, in McAlester, Okla.

Photo: Liliana Segura/ The Intercept

The Serial Killer State

Eizember was the first of 11 people scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma this year. The state’s execution spree began in 2021, when officials broke a six-year moratorium that had followed a string of botched executions and the near-killing of Richard Glossip using the wrong drug in 2015. For the next several years, officials at the department of corrections and state attorney general’s office set about to improve the state’s execution protocol.

Yet Oklahoma restarted executions with few reforms in place — even as a federal lawsuit challenging the revised lethal injection protocol was set to go to trial. When the first execution, in October 2021, went awry, officials were undeterred, carrying out three more before the trial began last February. The court upheld the state’s protocol in June, sparking an onslaught of execution dates. As it stands, Oklahoma plans to kill 20 more people by the end of 2024.

Oklahoma plans to kill 20 more people by the end of 2024.

To Eizember’s longtime attorney Randall Coyne, the scheduled executions are a dark period in a state that has never made it easy to practice capital defense. Oklahoma is now “the serial killer state,” he said wryly. “Come for the executions, stay for the casinos.” In addition to Eizember, Coyne represents two other men slated to die.

The 2003 crimes that sent Eizember to death row were notorious in Oklahoma. The Cantrells, both in their 70s, were killed in their home in the small town of Depew, some 40 miles southwest of Tulsa, where Eizember had just gotten out of jail. He broke into the home because the couple lived across the street from the parents of his ex-girlfriend, Kathy Biggs, who had taken out a protective order against him. He planned to confront her. Although he was convicted for killing both of the Cantrells, Eizember always insisted that he and A.J. Cantrell struggled over a shotgun that he’d found in the house — and that in attempting to shoot Eizember, Cantrell accidentally killed his wife instead. Eizember then overpowered Cantrell, beating him to death.

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According to Eizember’s clemency petition, the evidence supported his version of events and should have been critical to showing that he was not guilty of premeditated murder. Coyne emphasized that Eizember was unarmed when he arrived at the home. “Comparing Scott Eizember to the worst of the worst for whom the death penalty is supposedly reserved is not even a close case,” he said. But Eizember became despised as much for the couple’s violent deaths as for the out-of-control rampage that followed. He shot and wounded Biggs’s teenage son, beat her mother, and after running from the law for more than a month, terrorized a couple who offered him a ride, forcing them to drive at gunpoint and leaving them on the side of the road.

For his own part, Eizember maintained that he belonged in prison but that executing him would be nothing more than vengeance. In a series of phone calls with Hood, which he allowed him to release as a podcast, Eizember shared his life story, including his earliest memories. In Eizember’s appeal for clemency, his lawyers wrote that he had been profoundly impacted by childhood trauma, starting with his mother’s suicide (“I still have questions about that,” he told Hood; he suspected that she had actually been murdered) and continuing with emotional and physical abuse by his father, whom he would later discover was actually his stepdad.

Coyne’s contribution to the clemency petition was deeply personal. Although his upbringing was “substantially less dysfunctional” than his client’s, Coyne wrote, “Scott and I both were raised by alcoholic parents. We exchanged personal accounts of seeking the love and approval of parents whose addictions to alcohol rendered them at best remote and insensate, and at worst cruel and physically abusive.” Like Eizember, Coyne had developed a drinking problem and “wreaked havoc on my family.” While the toll of Eizember’s upbringing was obvious, “our friendship made me wonder what price I had paid,” Coyne wrote. “I still search for the answer, but with an acute awareness that but for the grace of God I could be confined to the cell adjacent to his.”

A.J. and Patsy Cantrell.

Photo: Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office

A Win and a Loss

Among the death penalty’s many hidden traumas is the rush of litigation that immediately precedes an execution. Although it can lead a court to spare a person’s life, last-minute stays are often granted only to be lifted shortly thereafter, yanking the condemned and their families through a cycle of terror, hope, and despair. On several occasions, people have laid on the gurney for hours while litigation is resolved, a particular kind of torture that scares people on death row almost as much as a botched execution.

With no remaining legal claims before state or federal courts, Eizember had appeared poised to avoid such chaos. But a week before his execution, a prison chaplain informed him that his request for Hood to accompany him inside the chamber had been denied on security grounds. Hood was on the phone with Eizember at the time and overheard the whole thing. “He said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’” Hood recalled. Agitated, Hood called veteran capital defense attorney Gregory Gardner.

Gardner has litigated religious liberty claims on behalf of other people on death row. To him, it seemed immediately clear that Oklahoma was violating both Hood’s and Eizember’s constitutional rights. The state had altered its execution guidelines after the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a condemned man in Alabama who requested the company of his spiritual adviser in the execution chamber in 2021. The next year, in Ramirez v. Collier, the justices ruled 8-1 that a spiritual adviser should be allowed to “lay hands” on a person being executed.

Gardner spoke to Coyne, who found the whole thing absurd. Hood had been visiting Eizember for months. “And suddenly, he becomes a dangerous security risk inside an execution chamber that’s filled with guards,” Coyne said. The real problem was that Hood was a vocal anti-death penalty activist. “Our concern was that they were they were banning him because of First Amendment stuff that he had done outside the prison,” Gardner said.

At 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Hood is not what most people would consider menacing. The self-described pacifist and radical preacher had been arrested a handful of times for acts of civil disobedience. One arrest, in 2016, was for stepping forward with his hands up to breach the yellow caution tape that keeps protesters in Texas at a distance from the execution chamber. But Hood said he was loath to get arrested these days — let alone for disrupting an execution, which would involve serious criminal charges and be harmful to his wife and five kids.

Eizember’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, accusing prison officials of violating the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. In response, department spokesperson Josh Ward accused Hood of disrespecting Eizember’s victims and the solemnity of the execution. “Out of respect for the families of victims, ODOC will not allow the outbursts of activists to interfere, regardless of that activist’s declared role in the process.”

Yet the department had not bothered to check with the Cantrells’ loved ones before invoking them. The family was unaware of the controversy until they were contacted by a reporter. “I don’t think we would have any heartburn over his spiritual adviser sitting in, but that’s really not our call,” said Melton, the Cantrells’ nephew.

“I think I will forever feel like an accomplice to a murder.”

After a series of negotiations between Gardner and Oklahoma’s solicitor general, the lawsuit was settled. Although the ODOC initially offered Hood access to the chamber if he would agree to post a $100,000 bond, officials soon agreed to a more rational compromise. In a six-page document, Hood vowed to keep his prayers to “a quiet volume” and not to touch Eizember or “disrupt, delay, or impede the execution.” If he violated the agreement, he would be banned from Oklahoma prisons forever.

Legally it was a victory, Gardner said, although he struggled to label it that way. If they had pushed forward with the lawsuit, “maybe we would have gotten an injunction. Maybe he would have lived another year.” But in the end, his clients were satisfied with the outcome. “You’ve got to see it as a win in that sense, but it’s difficult.”

On the day after Eizember was killed, Hood called sounding a little bit more like himself. He had arrived home to Arkansas in time to see his kids and get a good night’s sleep. Now he was driving to Goodwill to buy books, which he liked to do to take his mind off things.

Perhaps the best thing about the lawsuit, aside from reiterating the rights of all those facing execution in Oklahoma, was that it had shifted the narrative about Eizember. Twenty years of news stories repeating the details of his crimes had given way to articles about his desire to be accompanied in his hour of death. “That’s a very human need,” Hood said.

Still, he remained haunted by a sense of complicity. “I think I will forever feel like an accomplice to a murder,” he said. After all, he had stood quietly at Eizember’s feet while he was killed by the state, doing nothing to stop it. “I think I will forever feel like somehow I was a part of the machine.” People told him not to think of it that way, but he could not help it. “And I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. I think we should probably all feel like that.”

The post Oklahoma Executes Scott Eizember, the First of 11 People It Plans to Kill This Year appeared first on The Intercept.

Glossip had twice been tried and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside Room 102 of a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to carrying out the killing but said it was all Glossip’s idea. Glossip has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

Over his 30-year career, Berlinger has received widespread acclaim for his work, including on wrongful convictions. When his four-part series “Killing Richard Glossip” was released in 2017, it quickly raised the profile of Glossip’s case. Inspired by The Intercept’s reporting, Berlinger’s series delved into the myriad issues that have plagued Glossip’s conviction and revealed startling new evidence that undercut the state’s theory of the crime.

In his brief to the parole board, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor sidestepped the problems with the state’s case and instead attacked those who would call it into question, including Berlinger. “I took it as desperation on the AG’s part,” Berlinger told The Intercept. “It’s unbelievable that they would go to such lengths to discredit a documentary.”

“What other facts have been selectively cherry-picked by the state?”

Over nearly five pages, the AG’s office poked at alleged factual inaccuracies in Berlinger’s series that it deemed “somewhat minor” — allegations Berlinger calls specious — before taking a broad swipe at the documentary as being deliberately slanted in Glossip’s favor. Berlinger said he wasn’t troubled by the fact that the AG attacked his work so much as how he did it.

“It is a documentary hoping to bend the truth in order to convey Glossip’s side as possessing both a legal and moral superiority,” the AG wrote. “Indeed, Berlinger has even acknowledged as much in his other work.” For this proposition, the AG cited a 2021 Irish Times article, claiming that “Berlinger noted that his work ‘allows [him] to play with the nature of truth. Because we live in this post-truth society.’”

But that’s not what Berlinger told the Irish Times.

The filmmaker was talking about a different documentary series — focused on internet sleuths trying to solve what they believed was a murder — that illuminated the dangers of ignoring facts in favor of conjecture.

To make it sound like Berlinger was also talking about the Glossip case, the AG’s office left out the first part of his quote — it was “the series,” Berlinger said, that allowed him to “play with the nature of truth” — and then omitted the following sentence: “I’ve spent a lot of my time doing wrongful conviction cases and being involved at the criminal justice system where circumstantial evidence has led to tragic results. This case shows how, despite all the evidence, people can be so convinced of their own beliefs.”

For Berlinger, the mischaracterization was infuriating and unnerving. “They changed one word, which makes all the difference in the world, and left out the next consecutive sentence, which really changes the whole meaning of things,” he said. If they would do something so brazen and easily disproved to him, what might they do to Glossip?

Berlinger decided to write a letter to the parole board. “If facts are so selectively presented by the state in their clemency brief about one filmmaker’s work,” he wrote, “you must ask yourselves, what other facts have been selectively cherry-picked by the state to tell a convincing but false narrative in Richard Glossip’s case?”

Richard Glossip gives an interview from Oklahoma’s death row in the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”

Still: Courtesy of Joe Berlinger

Willful Blindness

Nearly 25 years after he was first accused of plotting his boss’s brutal murder, Glossip is approaching his eighth scheduled execution date in early 2023. On February 16, if Oklahoma finally gets its way, Glossip will be executed by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in McAlester, one week after his 60th birthday.

Yet the evidence pointing to Glossip’s wrongful conviction has only grown stronger over time. His most recent execution date was put on hold by Gov. Kevin Stitt, who granted a stay of execution to allow the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to consider filings from Glossip’s defense team, which asked the court to hear new evidence in the case. Among the most recent revelations are handwritten letters from Sneed that showed a desire to take back his story about being coerced to kill Van Treese — a narrative that provided the basis for the state’s entire case against Glossip.

The courts have routinely brushed aside such discoveries. With Glossip’s execution date looming, his clemency hearing — tentatively set to take place later this month — may be the last chance for authorities to spare the life of a man whose case has become emblematic of the profound problems with Oklahoma’s death penalty system and capital punishment as a whole. “We now know what really happened — both how the crime was actually committed and how an innocent man got sent to death row,” Glossip’s attorneys argue in their clemency application. Yet prosecutors have continued to insist that their client should die, they write, “without regard to recent developments because two juries found him guilty and sentenced him to death. That is willful blindness.”

Sneed’s version of events was dubious from the start, the product of a coercive interrogation in which homicide detectives repeatedly emphasized their belief that Glossip was involved. Beginning with his confession to police and continuing through each of Glossip’s two trials, where he was the star witness, Sneed couldn’t seem to keep his details straight — not about what led up to the crime, what happened inside Room 102, or who did what after the fact to try to cover it all up. Sneed said Glossip promised to pay him thousands of dollars to kill Van Treese, but the exact amount changed over time.

According to the state, not long before he was murdered, Van Treese discovered that Glossip had been embezzling from the nearly all-cash operation while letting the ratty motel slide into disrepair; he was planning to fire Glossip. The state has argued that in an effort to keep his job, Glossip hatched a plan to kill Van Treese and take over motel operations.

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Although Glossip has always maintained that this is preposterous — “I wouldn’t hurt nobody for a job,” he said on the stand in 1998 — he did himself no favors in the immediate aftermath of Van Treese’s murder. When he was first interviewed by police, he failed to tell them about a chilling exchange he says he had with Sneed in the early morning hours of January 7, 1997. Sneed had banged on the wall of Glossip’s apartment at the motel, waking him up; when Glossip opened the door, Sneed told him that a couple of drunks had broken a window — and that he’d killed their boss, Van Treese. Glossip insists that he thought Sneed was joking. But he withheld the information long enough to give people reason to believe he was covering for Sneed. By the time Glossip went to trial, he’d been cast as a sinister puppet master who brainwashed Sneed into committing murder.

For more than two decades, the state has insisted that Sneed was a meek dolt who was powerless to resist Glossip, despite the fact that it was Sneed alone who carried out the bloody attack. Meanwhile, a host of new witnesses have come forward with information disputing the state’s narrative. Residents of the Best Budget Inn said that Sneed was conniving, violent, and often resorted to theft to fund his drug addiction. Men who were incarcerated with Sneed say he boasted about falsely implicating Glossip to avoid facing the death penalty.

One man who spent time with Sneed in the Oklahoma County Jail told Berlinger that Sneed said he and a woman had lured Van Treese into Room 102 to rob him. One of the lead detectives on the case, Bob Bemo, told Berlinger that he doubted Sneed ever meant to kill Van Treese. “He ended up killing Barry. … I don’t know that he intended to, but he did,” Bemo said. “He beat him pretty good.” At one point during his interrogation, Sneed also told the cops that he only meant to incapacitate Van Treese. “I just really meant just to knock him out,” he said. In other words, even Sneed has intimated that the crime was a robbery gone wrong and not a murder for hire.

In 2021, a group of mostly conservative, pro-death penalty Oklahoma state lawmakers asked the governor and the Pardon and Parole Board to conduct an independent investigation into Glossip’s conviction. Neither Stitt nor the board members (the majority of whom are appointed by Stitt) obliged, so in early 2022, the lawmakers sought the help of the law firm Reed Smith LLP, which launched a pro bono, four-month investigation.

“There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me. Some things I need to clean up.”

A team of attorneys and investigators reviewed more than 12,000 documents and interviewed dozens of witnesses. The result was a bombshell 343-page report that took issue with nearly every aspect of the state’s case against Glossip. Among the revelations: A box of financial records, potentially key to determining if any money was missing from the motel, was destroyed while Glossip’s first conviction was on appeal. By the time he was retried, the evidence was gone. In marking the evidence for destruction, the DA’s office falsely claimed that Glossip’s appeals had been exhausted; oddly, the box was also assigned a new case number, a move that would effectively hide it from anyone searching for the evidence.

Since then, the firm has released additional startling information, including that Sneed considered taking back his story about Glossip. In 2003, a year before Glossip was retried, Sneed wrote to his public defender, Gina Walker, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he again reached out to Walker. “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. “Some things I need to clean up.” In response, Walker, who has since died, discouraged Sneed from recanting, writing that if he hadn’t testified, he likely would have ended up on death row.

Reed Smith also found evidence that Assistant District Attorney Connie Smothermon worked with Walker during Glossip’s second trial to modify Sneed’s testimony to fit the medical examiner’s finding that Van Treese had puncture wounds to his chest. Although there was a knife found at the scene, at the first trial Sneed denied attacking Van Treese with a knife. At the retrial, Sneed testified for the first time that he had stabbed Van Treese.

Sneed has not responded to The Intercept’s request for an interview.

GOP state Rep. Kevin McDugle, one of the driving forces behind the lawmakers’ efforts to halt Glossip’s execution, is a stalwart supporter of capital punishment. But he is certain that Glossip is innocent. “If we put Richard Glossip to death, I will fight in this state to abolish the death penalty,” McDugle said.

Don Knight, Richard Glossip’s lead attorney, in the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”

Still: Courtesy of Joe Berlinger

An Insider’s Game

Where McDugle and others are clearly concerned about the integrity of the case against Glossip, the Oklahoma attorney general and five members of the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals remain unmoved.

In the wake of the Reed Smith reports, Glossip’s pro bono defense team, led by attorney Don Knight, filed two additional appeals to the court raising questions about the veracity of the case, asking for an evidentiary hearing, and arguing that Glossip is innocent. The lengthy filings laid out evidence that Glossip’s conviction was plagued by an inadequate police investigation as well as prosecutorial misconduct. The lawyers cried foul over the police destruction of evidence, Smothermon’s plotting with Walker to change Sneed’s testimony, and the failure to turn over Sneed’s ruminations regarding recantation.

In response, O’Connor, the attorney general, suggested that the destruction of evidence was just an honest misunderstanding. The letters Sneed wrote to Walker, meanwhile, only “establish that Sneed feels guilty about petitioner’s fate, possibly because of outside pressure.” In a second filing, O’Connor announced that Sneed had “never discussed recanting, in the legal sense.” (It was unfair, he noted, to assume that Sneed would understand the meaning of the word “recant.”)

The communication between Smothermon and Walker regarding Sneed’s testimony was no big deal, according to the AG, who argued that Sneed’s testimony wasn’t even inconsistent: Sneed first said that he didn’t stab Van Treese and during the second trial said only that he “tried to” stab Van Treese; since the knife didn’t fully penetrate the skin, the two statements weren’t in conflict, the AG wrote.

As for Glossip’s innocence claim, O’Connor argued that none of his evidence was credible and Glossip simply wanted to be spared the death penalty. “Were petitioner innocent, he should not wish to stay in prison,” he wrote. “Instead, he appears to have been slowly gathering evidence to use when his next execution date was set.” The AG argued that this approach was “completely inconsistent” with a claim of innocence.

In two separate opinions, the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Glossip’s innocence claim and embraced the state’s arguments — including the assertion that Sneed never expressed a desire to recant.

Asked about the AG’s briefs, Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, sighed. “I would say that they knew the audience that they were writing to,” he said. “They knew what they needed to say to the five judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals to give those five judges enough for them to write the terrible decisions that they wrote. It was like an insider’s game.”

“I just can’t imagine any person looking at me straight in the face and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, this is fine.’”

Mostly, Knight is frustrated. He’s spent the last seven years digging into Glossip’s case. And every new revelation brings him back to a central point: The police failed to conduct a thorough investigation into Van Treese’s murder. They never formally interviewed Van Treese’s widow, Donna, for example, and it took nearly a week for them to locate and interview Sneed. They didn’t preserve or interrogate financial documents related to the motel’s operations — so there’s no clear proof that any money was missing from the Oklahoma City property, let alone that Glossip was stealing. Not only was a box of financial records destroyed by the state before Glossip’s second trial, but inexplicably, the police also returned additional records to the Van Treese family shortly after the crime.

Knight has repeatedly written to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office asking for access to records that might provide answers. He has never received a response. “I’ve always just wanted to know what happened here,” Knight said.

Knight also sent a lengthy letter to O’Connor, laying out what detectives did and didn’t do and asking a basic question: Is this enough to support a capital murder conviction? Knight said he’s convinced that Glossip is innocent, but the point of the correspondence wasn’t to harp on that. Instead, he wanted to know if the state was truly satisfied with the murder investigation. “It seems to me that we ought to be able to agree on whether what these cops did was enough or not. … I just can’t imagine any person looking at me straight in the face and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, this is fine,’” he said. “And when you admit that this isn’t enough, the next question becomes, well, what do you do about it now?”

An aerial view of the Oklahoma County Courthouse in 2017 from the documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”

Still: Courtesy of Joe Berlinger

Intimidation Tactics

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board does not usually spare the lives of people facing execution. Although its votes are merely recommendations to the governor, who has the last word, on the rare occasions when the board has called for clemency, the decisions have often been mired in controversy. After board members voted in 2021 to spare the life of Julius Jones — a Black man convicted by a nearly all-white jury who insisted he was innocent — Oklahoma legislators tried to pass a law that would forbid the board from considering innocence claims at clemency hearings for the condemned.

Few politicians have tried to wield power against the board like outgoing Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater. In 2013, the year before Glossip first applied for clemency, Prater accused the board of violating the state’s Open Meeting Act by keeping a “secret” parole docket and improperly granting early release to people in prison. When the board members refused to resign, he had them arrested on criminal charges, which he dropped the following year. As Oklahoma tried to execute Glossip in 2015, Prater used similar intimidation tactics to try to silence witnesses who came forward. More recently, Prater targeted two board members whom he accused of anti-death penalty bias. As Prater embarked on his final year as DA in early 2022, both members resigned their positions.

Although Prater’s departure from office may give Glossip some reason for optimism, his chances before the board remain fraught with uncertainty. All five current board members will see their terms expire on January 8, at which point at least some will be replaced by new members chosen by the governor. Because a clemency hearing must take place no less than 21 days before a scheduled execution, even those appointed immediately will have little time to acquaint themselves with their new role, let alone the voluminous records in Glossip’s case, prior to his February 16 execution date.

When Glossip last went before the board in October 2014, his case had not yet reached national prominence. Rather than make a vociferous argument for their client’s innocence, his lawyers emphasized the weakness of his conviction. At most, they said, the evidence showed that Glossip was guilty of helping Sneed cover up the murder. They urged the board to consider whether they had “any doubt” as to Sneed’s version of events. “This case is entirely circumstantial except for Justin Sneed’s testimony,” Glossip’s lawyer Kathleen Lord said.

Prosecutors pushed back on the notion that this was a “one-witness case.” They pointed to the single piece of incriminating evidence that has haunted Glossip the most: his failure to tell Oklahoma City police what he knew when they first questioned him. Asked why he wasn’t forthcoming, Glossip repeated what he has told others over the years: “At first I didn’t believe [Sneed] did what he said he did.”

Several members of Van Treese’s family attended the 2014 hearing, including his widow, Donna, who held up a family photo taken a year before her husband’s death. Her voice trembling with emotion, she described how the murder had upended the lives of her children. She reminded the board of something she’d said on the stand at both trials: that Glossip had lied to her too. On January 7, before Van Treese’s body was found, she called Glossip on the phone. He reassured her that things were fine — and that Van Treese had simply gone to the hardware store to get supplies.

Glossip has always insisted that his statements about when he last saw Van Treese were misconstrued. While Donna Van Treese and others said Glossip claimed to have seen him leaving the motel around 7 a.m. on January 7, Glossip said he meant 7 p.m. the night before. Under questioning from a board member at the 2014 clemency hearing, Glossip said he did not remember saying Van Treese had gone to the hardware store.

All five board members voted to deny clemency.

The state’s new clemency brief was filed this summer. The 175-page document adheres closely to what was presented by the attorney general’s office in 2014. It again emphasizes Glossip’s failure to tell the police what he knew, while leaning heavily on witnesses who questioned his behavior after the crime. It doubles down on the notion that Sneed was a wide-eyed simpleton devoid of free will, ignoring those who have come forward over the years to debunk the state’s depiction.

Prosecutors described Sneed as a “Rottweiler puppy” and Glossip as the “dog trainer.”

The state’s portrayal of Sneed has always been exaggerated on its face. At Glossip’s 2004 retrial, prosecutors described Sneed as a “Rottweiler puppy” and Glossip as the “dog trainer.” In the latest clemency brief, the attorney general’s effort to paint Sneed as “childlike” verges on the absurd, casting him as so guileless and dependent that his emotions rise and fall dramatically with Glossip’s every move. The same office that has repeatedly weaponized the graphic crime scene photos from Room 102 also manages to downplay Sneed’s violent attack to the point where Van Treese almost comes across as the aggressor — defending himself until Sneed is “able to fight back” and “ultimately able to subdue him with blows from the bat.”

Members of the Van Treese family did not respond to emails about Glossip’s case. According to the attorney general’s office, which resubmitted the family’s 2014 letters to the board, relatives have chosen not to be involved in the clemency hearing this time around.

Of the few things that are new in the state’s clemency brief, none of them have much to do with whether Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder in 1997. To portray Glossip as a con man whose manipulative behavior continues to this day, the attorney general included letters from women who previously supported him but have had a change of heart.

In one affidavit, his ex-wife, who is less than half his age, described how she began a relationship with Glossip after seeing Berlinger’s documentary. “At first, I gave him small amounts of money, then it rapidly grew to higher amounts of money as the relationship progressed,” she wrote. Over time, she said, he would “throw temper tantrums” or threaten to hurt himself if she did not do what he wanted. After they divorced, she concluded he was using her. Another woman, who was not romantically involved with Glossip but also gave him money, wrote that she no longer believes he is innocent. Neither woman said explicitly that they wish Glossip to be executed. Nor did they respond to emails or phone calls from The Intercept.

Of course, Glossip, who has since remarried, does not face execution for mistreating his partner or taking financial advantage of people from his death row cell. Nor do the affidavits suggest he poses a danger to society — something even his second jury failed to find in 2004. Glossip’s prison record shows no signs of violence toward the people who live and work around him. As his clemency petition reminds the board, “Glossip had no prior criminal record and has been a model prisoner for over 25 years.”

For Berlinger’s part, he says he debated whether he should write a letter to the board at all. “Will it matter?” he asked himself. This wasn’t about him, after all. He was just a “grain of sand on the beach” of this complex case, yet the state had decided to focus disproportionate attention on him in a way that was flatly dishonest. That’s what convinced him to write the letter. “I wanted the clemency board to understand that if they did it to me, wouldn’t this be their whole approach to things?”

The post Facing His Eighth Execution Date, Richard Glossip Asks for Clemency appeared first on The Intercept.

Now there may be light at the end of the tunnel. On December 6, a settlement conference will take place at the federal courthouse in downtown Tucson. Jones will be transported from death row to attend. Unlike past hearings in his case, the proceedings will be closed to the public, comprising a series of negotiations between Jones’s legal team and attorneys representing the state. The Pima County Attorney’s Office, which first prosecuted Jones in 1995, will also attend.

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Such meetings are common in civil disputes, which are frequently resolved through mediation. But they are unusual in death penalty cases. The decision to undertake the negotiation was made at a hearing earlier this year, where U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess encouraged both parties to try to find a way to end the protracted legal fight. “I do think it would be in everybody’s best interest, including society’s best interest, if we can resolve this case,” Burgess said.

Burgess has presided over Jones’s case since 2016. Recently retired as the chief U.S. district judge for Alaska, he was appointed to the case due to a conflict of interest: One of Jones’s attorneys at trial had since become a federal magistrate judge, leading Arizona’s federal district judges to recuse themselves. The settlement conference will be overseen by a different Alaska judge, who will act as a mediator.

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Twenty-Two Years After Arizona Sent Barry Jones to Death Row, the State’s Case Has Fallen Apart

Jones was sent to death row in 1995 for killing and sexually assaulting his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. The evidence against him was thin, based on a narrow time frame during which Jones was seen taking trips with Rachel in his work van the day before she died. At an evidentiary hearing in 2017, lawyers for Jones exposed Pima County investigators’ rush to judgment and presented powerful exculpatory evidence that his trial lawyers had failed to uncover. Most crucially, they called expert witnesses who said that Rachel’s fatal injuries could not have been inflicted so close to her death. In 2018, Burgess vacated Jones’s conviction. If not for the failures of his trial attorneys, Burgess wrote, there was “a reasonable probability that his jury would not have convicted him of any of the crimes” that sent him to death row.

Burgess ordered Arizona to retry or release Jones. Instead, the state attorney general appealed the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that under the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Burgess should never have granted Jones the hearing that allowed him to present the new medical evidence. In a 6-3 ruling reversing the court’s own precedent, the justices agreed.

The decision was devastating for Jones, his family, and his legal team. It also dealt a huge blow to countless incarcerated people who had received poor lawyering at trial and in state post-conviction proceedings. In an article for the journal of the New York Bar Association, Sandman wrote that the decision “established a new precedent that will insulate many wrongful convictions and constitutionally tainted death sentences from federal review.” He called on Congress to reverse the ruling — and vowed to keep fighting for Jones.

Among those who have expressed dismay at the Supreme Court’s ruling is an unlikely voice: Rachel Gray’s older sister, Becky, who testified against Jones at his 1995 trial. In a two-part episode of the podcast “Conviction” released last month, Becky, now in her late 30s, told producers that she had begun to question Jones’s guilt after reading The Intercept’s coverage of the case. “For so long I hated this guy, and he could very well have been innocent,” Becky said. “And now, thanks to the Supreme Court, there’s not even anything that can be done.”

Becky’s recollections of Jones were consistent with what many others have shared with The Intercept and Jones’s legal team over the years. She described her mother, Angela Gray, as physically abusive — Gray was sentenced to eight years in prison for child abuse following Rachel’s death — while recalling Jones as patient with Rachel. “If she wanted to talk about anything, he would stop what he was doing and he would sit there and talk to her,” Becky said. Her little sister liked to watch Jones work in his van, she said. “I’m pretty sure she probably knew how to rebuild the transmission.”

A few days before Thanksgiving, lawyers representing the Innocence Network sent a letter to the Pima County Attorney’s Office. “We are writing to provide our perspective on the state’s ethical duties as it approaches the upcoming settlement conference,” the letter read. It noted Burgess’s conservative credentials; a former U.S. attorney appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, Burgess reviewed dozens of petitions from incarcerated people challenging their convictions and sentences during his tenure, granting relief in only one case: Jones’s.

More importantly, the letter emphasized the evidence that convinced Burgess to overturn Jones’s conviction in 2018. “While the state may have been largely unaware of much of that evidence when it made its initial charging decision and at the time of trial, its current knowledge of the evidence … triggers the ethical obligations of prosecutors to correct erroneous convictions and seek exoneration when there has been a miscarriage of justice.” This obligation is especially important when a person’s legal options have been effectively exhausted, the letter went on. Prosecutors “are duty bound by their professional ethics, and hopefully most would feel bound by their own conscience, to take affirmative action to correct the taint of an unjust conviction.”

Until now, the Pima County Attorney’s Office has declined to intervene, insisting that there is little it can do as long as Jones’s case remains in the hands of the Arizona attorney general. On Thursday, the new head of the Pima County Conviction and Sentencing Integrity Unit, Brad Roach, maintained that the attorney general retains jurisdiction in the case. But he acknowledged that “there have been serious questions raised” and said that his office is committed to a just outcome. The Pima County attorney is “happy to do whatever it takes to make sure justice is done in this case.”

In the meantime, Jones is spending another holiday season on death row. On Thanksgiving the prison served him turkey and a piece of pie. During a visit two days later, his daughter, Brandie, broke the news that Jones’s 35-year-old nephew had recently died. He put on a strong face, she said. “But I could see that deep down it was hurting him more than he was letting on.” Although Jones does not seem optimistic about the settlement conference, it could be his best chance of reuniting with his family in the coming year. “I’m trying to keep his hopes up.”

The post Barry Jones Is Spending Another Holiday Season on Death Row. Could It Be His Last? appeared first on The Intercept.

When it came to Johnson’s crime, there was not much to say that Ramey didn’t already know. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that he’d killed a police officer when he was 19. It wasn’t easy, but “it wasn’t a secret,” she said. Most importantly, it did not change who Johnson was to her. As Ramey got older, they talked about the ordinary things parents discuss with their kids: school, family, and his hopes for her future.

But on New Year’s Day 2022, when Ramey was 18, Johnson called her sounding different. “He was kind of like throwing hints at me,” she said, suggesting that he might not be around for much longer. The conversation unnerved her. It seemed clear that he was trying to prepare her for an execution date.

Later that night, Ramey found out she was pregnant. She worried about disappointing her dad; with his encouragement, Ramey had graduated early from high school and was studying to become a nurse. Under her red graduation gown, she’d worn a T-shirt printed with a photo of her dad, along with her maternal grandmother and mother, who was murdered in front of Ramey just months before Johnson was convicted. “I did it for y’all,” the T-shirt read.

In late August, Ramey got a phone call from her aunt. She told Ramey that her father had received an execution date and warned her that it would be all over the news. Shortly afterward, Johnson called. “They came and got me and told me to pack all my stuff,” he told her. His execution had been set for November 29.

Ramey gave birth just two weeks later. On Facebook, she posted baby pictures of herself, her dad, and her son, whom she named Kaius. In October, she brought him to see Johnson, who was able to hold his grandson for the first time. “That was a very special moment,” Ramey said.

Ramey spoke to The Intercept over the phone in early November while doing a shift at the nursing home where she works. She had not discussed her father’s looming execution date with her employer, let alone taking time off to deal with it. This was one of several logistical questions she was still figuring out. Another was even more daunting. At 19, she was too young to attend the execution under Missouri law. She did not know where she would be as the state took Johnson’s life. It felt important to be at the prison. Even if her dad couldn’t see her, Ramey said, “he would at least know that I’m there with him in his final moments and he wasn’t alone.”

But as Johnson’s execution date got closer, Ramey decided that wasn’t enough. On November 21, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency motion asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri to intervene and allow her to attend the execution. “My father has been the only parent for almost all of my life,” she wrote in a declaration to the court. “He is the most important person in my life. If my father were dying in the hospital, I would sit by his bed holding his hand and praying for him until his death, both as a source of support for him, and as a support for me as a necessary part of my grieving process.”

With Johnson’s execution days away, a number of legal challenges are still pending before the courts. The most pressing is whether Johnson’s conviction was unconstitutionally tainted by pervasive racism, as a special prosecutor appointed to review the case has determined; the prosecutor is now seeking to vacate Johnson’s death sentence.

In the 17 years since Johnson was sentenced to die, St. Louis County has become infamous for structural racism, most visible in its policing and prosecution practices. Johnson’s case is emblematic of these dynamics and how the death penalty has been deployed to reinforce the status quo. To Johnson’s attorney Shawn Nolan, the special prosecutor’s findings mean Johnson’s execution must not move forward. “Civilized countries don’t execute people based on the color of their skin,” Nolan said, “but that is what the state of Missouri is about to do.”

Kevin Johnson’s younger brother Joseph Long, whom everyone called Bam Bam.

Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

The Crime

Nineteen-year-old Kevin Johnson was at his great-grandmother’s house on July 5, 2005, when two police officers showed up, snooping around his white Ford Explorer. Johnson was on probation in connection with a domestic dispute involving his former girlfriend, the mother of his young daughter, Khorry. He had violated the terms of his probation, and the cops were looking to arrest him and perhaps tow his ride. Johnson didn’t want that to happen, and he had an idea. He gave his car keys to his little brother Joseph Long, whom everyone called Bam Bam.

Johnson and his siblings had been raised in difficult circumstances in Meacham Park, a predominantly Black neighborhood in wealthy, mostly white Kirkwood, Missouri, one of the many suburbs that sprawl west of St. Louis. Johnson’s mother was addicted to crack, and his dad was incarcerated for most of Johnson’s young life. Johnson and his siblings had been abused and neglected, at times left for days to fend for themselves. Johnson was particularly protective of 12-year-old Bam Bam, who’d been exposed to cocaine in utero and was born with a congenital heart defect that required major surgery not long after his birth.

Johnson asked Bam Bam to take the car keys next door, where his grandmother Pat Ward lived, to make it look like she owned the Explorer. Bam Bam got up and ran next door. As Johnson watched from the window, what he saw set off a chain reaction that he would forever regret. Ward came out of the house, keys in hand, Johnson later recalled, asking the cops to come quick: Bam Bam had passed out.

Johnson couldn’t see Bam Bam, but after the cops arrived at Ward’s front door, he saw one of them step over something as he made his way inside. Sirens wailed as an ambulance approached along with a third cop, Kirkwood Police Sgt. William McEntee. Johnson’s impulse was to race next door to help, but his family told him to stay put or risk arrest. When Johnson’s mother, Jada Tatum, arrived, McEntee pushed her back, Johnson recalled, nearly knocking her off the porch. “It looked to me … like they was fighting, and I started to get mad,” Johnson later testified. “Then eventually my mom just stopped, she went into the yard and started crying.”

Nearly 20 minutes after the ambulance arrived, Johnson saw the first responders leaving with Bam Bam on a stretcher. His shirt was off, and his feet were dangling over the side.

Not long afterward, Ward returned with the news that Bam Bam was gone. An autopsy later revealed that he’d died of heart failure. Johnson was too shocked to react at first, he said. Then he became distraught, kicking the hinges off his bedroom door. If he hadn’t asked Bam Bam to take the keys, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, he thought. Why had the cops reacted so casually when Ward asked for their help? If Bam Bam had been taken to the hospital sooner, maybe he would be alive.

Johnson went outside trying to clear his head. He removed a pistol from the back of his car and put it in his pocket; if the cops came back to tow the car, he later explained, the gun could put him in even bigger trouble. As Johnson wandered around on foot, people asked him if it was true that Bam Bam had died; news spread quickly through tight-knit Meacham Park. He told his cousin that he thought the cops were responsible.

Around 7:30 p.m. McEntee was back in Meacham Park, responding to a call about someone setting off fireworks. He pulled his cruiser next to three boys, one of whom was carrying a spent firecracker. As he talked to them through the driver’s side window, Johnson walked past on the passenger’s side. He caught McEntee’s eye, and the cop smiled at him. Johnson raised his gun. “You killed my brother,” witnesses recalled him saying as he fired into the car, striking McEntee multiple times. One of the bullets tore through McEntee’s cheek and lodged in his jaw.

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Although seriously wounded, McEntee was able to put the car into drive, lurching up the street before hitting a tree. Neighbors were screaming. Johnson ran into his mother, who asked him what he’d done. The cops killed Bam Bam, he told her. No, she replied, Bam Bam just died. She started crying; what about his daughter, Khorry, she pleaded. Johnson remembers taking off running to see Khorry. Cutting through a path between two houses, he found himself back by McEntee’s crashed car. The bloodied officer was kneeling on the pavement. Onlookers scattered as Johnson walked up behind McEntee and shot him in the head.

McEntee was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Johnson fled in his Explorer, passing a stream of cop cars on their way to the scene. Only then did he understand what he had done, he later testified. When he turned himself in three days later, Johnson had one request: that police first let him see his toddler, Khorry. They refused.

A photo of Kevin Johnson from his elementary school yearbook.

Photo: Courtesy Pam Stanfield

The Trials

McEntee’s murder was front page news in St. Louis. Kirkwood had not seen a law enforcement officer killed in over 100 years, police told the press. The 43-year-old father of three had been with the Kirkwood police since the 1980s. Outside the police department, people left flowers and balloons on the lawn.

St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said he was considering seeking the death penalty against Johnson. During his 17 years in office, McCulloch had gained a reputation for winning death sentences — and having a personal stake in punishing cop killers. He was just 12 years old when his own father was killed in the line of duty; Paul McCulloch was “one of the best known officers on the St. Louis police force,” according to a 1964 news article that lauded him as a famed canine handler whose dog had a knack for sniffing out drugs. A Black man named Eddie Glenn was convicted and sentenced to death for McCulloch’s murder. But after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty in 1972, the sentence was reduced to life.

While the headlines trumpeted a possible death sentence against Johnson, many in Meacham Park felt that the full story surrounding McEntee’s death was not being reported. Family members told a Black columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Johnson had been distraught by Bam Bam’s death in part because police had been more focused on arresting him than helping his brother. After the columnist wrote about Bam Bam’s funeral preparations, readers wrote in to say that the writer had “slandered a fallen officer” and “excused a killer.”

“They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me.”

Johnson was tried twice, beginning in March 2007. The courtroom was packed with family members on both sides, along with a slew of police officers. In his opening statement to the jury, McCulloch acknowledged Bam Bam’s death as the precursor to McEntee’s murder. But he rejected the claim that police had failed to act quickly to help the child — or that McEntee had mistreated Tatum, Bam Bam’s mother. An EMT testified that they were attempting lifesaving measures when Tatum approached, so he asked McEntee to sit with her on the porch.

Most importantly, McCulloch rejected the notion that Johnson had acted impulsively, without premeditation. He argued that Johnson had taken the gun from his car with the explicit intent to kill a police officer and dismissed Johnson’s claim that he had been en route to see his daughter when he came upon McEntee the second time. Johnson had returned to the scene after hearing that McEntee was still alive, McCulloch said, then ruthlessly finished the job. “Each one of those shots, in and of itself, is deliberation,” he told the jury.

A police department portrait of Sgt. William McEntee circa 2005.

Photo: Kirkwood Police Department

Although most of the witnesses who knew Johnson said on cross-examination that they had never had problems with him before, McCulloch cast Johnson as a menace who would kill again if given the chance. Not only had he killed McEntee in cold blood, McCulloch said, but Johnson had also tried to murder witnesses who might testify against him.

The evidence for this claim was thin. One witness, 19-year-old Anthony Davis, who knew Johnson from the neighborhood, had agreed to testify against Johnson only after being arrested at the courthouse, where investigators for McCulloch’s office claimed that Davis was intimidating witnesses. No witnesses had complained of intimidation, yet Davis was thrown in jail and his bond was set at $100,000. On the stand at trial, Davis admitted that he was testifying in order to resolve his own legal troubles; his version of events clashed with what others said. In addition to claiming that he had seen Johnson’s family members menacing witnesses, Davis testified that Johnson had told him on the day of the murder that he was going to kill the first cop he saw. A jailhouse informant with a long rap sheet also testified at length about an elaborate plot he’d discussed with Johnson to have key witnesses killed.

It was true that several witnesses seemed reluctant to testify against Johnson. Some had given statements to police, only to back off upon taking the stand. But while McCulloch told the jury that Johnson had threatened them, it was also plausible that witnesses had felt intimidated by police. One woman who was visiting family in Meacham Park on the night of the murder testified that contrary to what she told police, she had not seen Johnson shoot McEntee. “I felt scared. I felt they was intimidating me, pressuring me,” she said.

On March 31, Johnson took the stand. He recounted how he had seen police outside the house, how McEntee had manhandled his mother, and how shocked he was to hear that his brother was dead. He remembered telling his friends that the police had not done anything to help Bam Bam. “They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me,” he said. When he saw McEntee smile at him from inside his police car, “I flipped out, and I pulled out my gun, and I started shooting,” he said. He could not explain what he was thinking. “I was just in a trance.”

McCulloch mocked Johnson’s “trance nonsense” in his closing statement. But the defense said he was merely trying to find words to describe his tragic mistake. “What he’s talking about is acting without thinking,” defense attorney Robert Steele said.

Jurors found this position persuasive. When it came time to decide Johnson’s fate, a majority believed that he was not guilty of first-degree murder. Deliberations were contentious, according to jurors who later gave statements to Johnson’s appellate attorneys. One Black juror described a pair of white jurors who “kept loudly repeating that they couldn’t vote for 2nd degree because Kevin would get out and hunt them down.” One of them “kept yelling things about ‘your neighborhoods’ and ‘you people’” when talking to Black jurors, he said.

Another Black juror said that she had been called to speak to the trial judge after a white woman on the jury accused her of “intimidating” behavior. For all the talk of intimidation, the juror said, it was the heavy police presence that made her the most uneasy. “We were aware from the beginning of the trial that cops were going to be heavily packing the courtroom. I even had my neighbor drive me because someone warned me that cops would run my plates if I parked in the garage.”

Johnson’s retrial took place later that year. Whereas the previous jury had been evenly split between Black and white jurors, this time the jury was made up of nine white and three Black jurors.

There were other changes. McCulloch eliminated the jailhouse informant with the story about plotting to kill witnesses and added a video reenactment of the crime. He also bolstered testimony about the officers’ efforts to save Bam Bam and emphasized that McEntee had not mistreated Johnson’s mother. “Was he very deferential to her?” McCulloch asked one of the cops who responded to the scene. “Yes, he just tried to get her to go out of the house, and he was kind of holding on to her, trying to hold her up,” the cop said. “She was very upset about her son.”

McCulloch’s final witness at the retrial was St. Louis County Medical Examiner Mary Case, who described the damage each bullet had inflicted on McEntee. Using a model skeleton, she demonstrated where the bullets had entered his body, noting that McEntee might have survived some of the most severe injuries, but there was no way to survive being shot in the head.

On November 8, 2007, the jury convicted Johnson of first-degree murder.

“They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately.”

The sentencing phase began immediately. McCulloch called McEntee’s three siblings, who testified about the hole his death had left in their family. His sister Cathy testified that after she gave birth to a daughter with a heart problem, McEntee had helped with the baby’s tube feedings. “He was very supportive — and very supportive when I lost her,” she said.

In contrast, defense attorneys cast Johnson as an unwanted child who had never known a stable home. His grandmother described how 2-year-old Johnson used to come to her house looking for food because his mother was too incapacitated from drug abuse to properly care for him. Records from the Division of Family Services described how caseworkers found Johnson and an older brother living amid cockroaches; Johnson has since described chasing the insects for food. During his years in and out of institutions and group homes, he did not receive the therapy he needed to overcome the trauma of his early life. A psychiatrist who evaluated Johnson said he had attempted suicide when he was 14.

McCulloch accused the defense of weaponizing Johnson’s upbringing to deny justice to McEntee’s family and the people of Meacham Park. “They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately, that he does not deserve it,” he said. The real problem, McCulloch insisted, was that Johnson did not take advantage of the opportunities he’d been given.

Before jurors voted to sentence her client to death, defense attorney Karen Kraft suggested that there was more to the case than they had seen. A defense witness had testified about being pulled over by McEntee multiple times while living in Meacham Park. Although he seemed reluctant to go into detail, he described how McEntee had screamed at him after ordering him out of his car. Kraft said she thought “long and hard” about whether to call this witness. “I don’t like speaking ill of the dead,” she said. But “there may be a side of Sergeant McEntee that his family didn’t see. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

Kevin Johnson and his daughter, Khorry Ramey, at Missouri’s Potosi Correctional Center on Oct. 18, 2022.

Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

Meacham Park

Johnson had been on death row for seven years when McCulloch’s name exploded onto the national stage in the wake of a different killing in St. Louis County. In 2014, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown. The shooting in Ferguson sparked mass protests and added the call “Hands up, don’t shoot” to the lexicon of the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.

McCulloch’s handling of Wilson’s prosecution would help turn the case into an emblem of institutionalized racism and impunity for violent cops. When McCulloch announced that a grand jury had declined to indict Wilson, he added fuel to the fire by blaming the media for the protests and declaring that the grand jurors, who were mostly white, “gave up their lives” to see the inquiry to its end.

The Ferguson protests exposed long-simmering tensions over law enforcement’s treatment of Black residents in St. Louis County. While the Department of Justice ultimately declined to file federal charges against Wilson, it found that Ferguson police “routinely” violated Black residents’ constitutional rights, using their powers to unlawfully detain and arrest residents in a scheme that prioritized revenue through fines and fees over the duty to ensure public safety. The department was not diverse, failed to engage with the community, ignored complaints of police misconduct, and engaged in practices that fostered “distrust and resentment.”

“Before there was a Ferguson, there was a Meacham Park.”

Such police abuses — and the grievances they engendered — were not isolated to Ferguson. To longtime residents of St. Louis County like Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Johnson’s case can only be fully understood in the context of the community’s relationship to police. “Before there was a Ferguson,” Smith said, “there was a Meacham Park.”

Then surrounded by fields and forests, Meacham Park was established in 1892 as an unincorporated Black enclave roughly 14 miles southwest of St. Louis. The dirt streets were named after prominent people and places in Black history. Although it lacked running water and sewers, by the early 20th century, Meacham Park was thriving.

But as suburban developments proliferated, weak state law governing the establishment of new municipalities left Meacham Park vulnerable, sparking a protracted tug of war over annexation by wealthy, white Kirkwood. Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa who has written about race and inequality in St. Louis County, described how municipal boundary-making was used as a tool of segregation. “You fragment local citizenship in such a way that some people get surveilled by the state and some people get served by the state,” Gordon said.

In the late 1950s, Kirkwood made its first land grab, annexing a valuable commercial strip of Meacham Park, for which the community got nothing in return. In 1956, Interstate 44 sliced through the community, paving over homes and leaving a wedge of the neighborhood stranded. Meanwhile, Kirkwood officials were wringing their hands: They didn’t want responsibility for providing services to Meacham Park, but they also didn’t want the area’s perceived problems coming into Kirkwood. As city leaders put it in a proposed action plan in 1966, “Mosquitoes, bred in the failing septic tanks in Meacham Park, or potential criminals, raised in an atmosphere devoid of police protection, are not respecters of municipal boundary lines.”

In 1991 the residents of Meacham Park finally agreed to an annexation plan. The promise was that commercial development along a discrete swath of its western edge would provide jobs for residents and bring in revenue needed for Kirkwood to extend services across the area. The promise was hollow: The development’s footprint ballooned, swallowing 100 homes and displacing residents for what in the end was a wall of big-box stores that only further isolated Meacham Park from the rest of Kirkwood.

The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways.”

In every practical sense, the first “service” to fully encompass Meacham Park was policing — or, more accurately, over-policing, which manifested itself in many of the same ways that would later be identified in Ferguson. “To be the subject of neglect and harassment simultaneously definitely set up a lot of harm in that community,” Smith said.

This dynamic was entrenched long before Johnson shot McEntee in July 2005. Court filings in Johnson’s case include affidavits from relatives and community members who described relentless police surveillance in Meacham Park. Patrol cars were omnipresent, and neighbors were hassled for minor infractions or questioned for seemingly no reason at all. In his affidavit, Dameion Pullum, a childhood friend of Johnson’s, said the cops once maced a group of kids for hanging out in a church parking lot after a high school football game and harassed Johnson’s grandmother’s husband for waxing his car in the driveway.

Several of the affidavits specifically named McEntee as contributing to the harassment. Pullum said McEntee was known as “Tackleberry” because “he was big, and he would tackle and beat people up.” Romona Miller, who was a science teacher at Kirkwood High School in 2005, told the Riverfront Times that students shared stories about “Mac” — including that he had escalated one encounter to the point that another officer had to intervene. “I had never heard the kids talk specifically about a person, so that was concerning to me,” Miller told the weekly. She said she contacted the Kirkwood police with her concerns but never heard back. “I often wonder, if that had been taken more seriously, we could have avoided a lot of this.” (A KPD spokesperson told the St. Louis Beacon that the chief had no recollection of Miller’s complaint. “He’s not saying it didn’t happen,” the spokesperson said. “We get a lot of complaints.”)

Smith stressed that reports of McEntee’s misconduct were not meant to “condone killing. We wish that McEntee was still here.” Still, she was blunt about the role he and other cops played in Meacham Park. “The reality of the situation is he was a terrorist in that community.”

Andrea Boyles, a sociology and Africana studies professor at Tulane University, interviewed Meacham Park residents about their experiences with police for her doctoral dissertation. That work later became the book “Race, Place, and Suburban Policing.”

There had been a “long-standing racial contention between Meacham Park and Kirkwood,” Boyles said, and “ultimately, there were a number of things that transpired … ranging from full loss of land and people losing their homes or being bought out, feeling like they had been manipulated” in the annexation process. Their distrust of the police was perhaps just the most visible manifestation of the disenchantment. “What they reported to me wasn’t just isolated to or told about the police, it was about the entire process, which included the city council,” she said, “and them already feeling like, in many respects, that they had been … indifferently characterized as baggage or weight or throwaways that needed to be saved by the neighboring rich white people.”

Residents told her that in the wake of violent incidents like McEntee’s killing, they felt that the whole community was being indicted, as if at fault for what happened. The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways,” Boyles said. “And the results of that, unfortunately, and without justifying or condoning, would be the loss of many lives. And the fact that we are now possibly facing another.”

St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell gives remarks during the mayoral inauguration ceremony for Ella James at the Urban League Empowerment Center in Ferguson, Mo., on June 17, 2020.

Photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images

A Cloud Over the Case

In the wake of Ferguson, voters ousted McCulloch, who had spent nearly 30 years in office, and elected a reform candidate. Former public defender and Ferguson City Council Member Wesley Bell became St. Louis County’s first Black elected prosecutor. In 2019, Bell launched a Conviction and Incident Review Unit, tasked with reviewing officer-involved shootings, allegations of police misconduct, and claims of wrongful prosecution or conviction — a deliberate departure from the status quo under McCulloch. “We know the same-old, same-old approach that we see incarcerating people based on their socio-economic stature, their zip code, their status, their race, their gender — that doesn’t work,” Bell told The Intercept at the time.

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While wrongful convictions are a persistent problem within the criminal legal system, until last year, Missouri prosecutors lacked a meaningful way to revisit a conviction they believed was wrongly obtained. In 2021, state legislators passed a law intended to fix the problem; by statute, prosecutors may, “at any time,” file a motion to vacate a conviction in the court where the defendant was originally tried. The trial court is required to hold a hearing to determine if “constitutional error at the original trial … undermines the confidence in the judgment.”

In December 2021, Johnson’s lawyers asked prosecutors to review his conviction, which they argued was unconstitutionally tainted by racial bias. There was an immediate issue, however: Steele, one of Johnson’s defense attorneys at trial, now works for Bell, creating a conflict of interest. In July, Bell’s office wrote to the Missouri Supreme Court, explaining that the office was reviewing Johnson’s case and looking for a special prosecutor to head up the inquiry. Prosecutors asked the court to refrain from setting an execution date. The court disregarded the request, setting Johnson’s execution for November.

“Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution.”

Nonetheless, in October, the St. Louis County Circuit Court appointed Kansas City attorney Edward Keenan as special prosecutor. Keenan reviewed more than 31,000 pages of documents related to the case, and in mid-November, he filed a motion with the trial court seeking to vacate Johnson’s conviction. “Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution,” he wrote, “and this error requires the judgment to be set aside.” The murder of McEntee was “horrific,” and his family deserved justice. “Unfortunately,” McCulloch “did not pursue that justice according to law,” Keenan wrote. “The law requires this court to … order a new trial that adheres to constitutional standards.”

Among the evidence laid out in Kennan’s motion was a memo he found within the prosecution’s files that showed McCulloch’s team had schemed to eliminate Black jurors from Johnson’s second trial. And he pointed to a speech McCulloch gave to the Oregon District Attorneys Association as evidence of racial animus. A week after he lost his primary race to Bell, McCulloch spoke at the association’s summer conference, where he aired his grievances about the unrest in Ferguson and showed a seemingly random photo of a group of young Black people standing together, telling the audience, “This is what we’re dealing with.” A number of prosecutors were stunned by the presentation. “I found Mr. McCulloch’s remarks to be offensive and unprofessional,” Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill told Willamette Week. “The implication was that these kids were thugs,” Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel said of the photo. “I was bothered by the implicit nature of his words.”

Perhaps most revealing is McCulloch’s history of charging decisions — an area where prosecutors have complete discretion. McCulloch prosecuted five police officer killings during his tenure. Four of them involved Black defendants; in each, McCulloch sought the death penalty. The fifth case involved a white defendant named Trenton Forster. In that case, McCulloch sought life. Forster’s conduct was far more aggravated than that of the other defendants, Keenan found. Among other things, Forster had bragged on social media about wanting to kill cops, suggesting that his attack was premeditated. Nonetheless, McCulloch took the extraordinary step of giving Forster’s public defender nearly a year to provide mitigating evidence that might convince McCulloch not to seek a death sentence. McCulloch did not offer this opportunity to any of the Black defendants.

Over the course of his career, McCulloch was far more likely to seek the death penalty in cases where the victim was white, according to a recent study by Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Baumgartner analyzed 408 death penalty-eligible murder cases from St. Louis County between 1991 and 2018 at the behest of Johnson’s legal team. He found that even after controlling for various circumstances, McCulloch’s office was 3.5 times more likely to seek death when the victim was white.

While two-thirds of victims in all eligible cases were Black, 62 percent of the cases ending in a death sentence involved white victims. Baumgartner’s analysis suggested that McCulloch set the bar higher when considering cases involving Black victims, seeking death more frequently when there were multiple victims. The same was not true where white victims were concerned, Baumgartner wrote: “A single white victim suffices.”

McCulloch did not respond to emails from The Intercept requesting comment. In a recent interview with the Riverfront Times, McCulloch defended his record and denied allegations of racially motivated prosecutions. “There’s no question that you can’t do the job that I did for as long as I did it and not have some people think that you’re a terrible person,” he said. “You just can’t do it.”

“This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error.”

Despite Missouri’s requirement that the trial court hold a hearing on the evidence, St. Louis County Presiding Judge Mary Elizabeth Ott denied Keenan’s motion the day after he filed it. In a subsequent order, Ott acknowledged that while capital punishment “is different from all other punishments” and “requires particular care in its application,” there was nonetheless “insufficient time” to conduct a thorough hearing before Johnson’s scheduled execution, which she said she had no power to stay.

Both Keenan and Johnson’s attorneys appealed the ruling to the Missouri Supreme Court, asking it to halt the execution so that the lower court could hold a hearing on the evidence. “This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error,” which has not been contested, Johnson’s lawyers wrote. “The state admits long-standing and pervasive racial bias in St. Louis County’s handling of this case and other death-eligible prosecutions, including the office’s decisions of which offense to charge, which penalty to seek, and which jurors to strike.”

“Unless this court stays the execution,” Keenan wrote in his appeal, “the result in this case will forever have this cloud over it.”

The Missouri Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on November 28, the day before Johnson is set to die.

Kevin Johnson pictured on death row at Missouri’s Potosi Correctional Center in 2022.

Photo: Courtesy of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

Witnessing Death

Two days before Thanksgiving, Rep. Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis, sent a letter alongside her Kansas City colleague Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. They urged Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to grant Johnson clemency. “Johnson’s cruel execution will not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including the scourge of gun violence,” they wrote. “It will simply destroy yet another family and community while using the concepts of fairness and justice as a cynical pretext.”

The letter drew from Johnson’s clemency petition, which emphasized his youth at the time of the crime. In 2005, the same year that Johnson killed McEntee, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed death sentences for people who committed capital crimes before the age of 18. The ruling in Roper v. Simmons was based on scientific research revealing the extent to which the human brain develops throughout a person’s teenage years. It is now well-established that the parts of the brain guiding impulse control continue to form well into early adulthood, and that factors like poverty, abuse, and neglect profoundly impact such development. Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association concluded that the prohibitions established by Roper should also apply to people between the ages of 18 and 20 — the age Johnson was in 2005.

Although Parson has not made an official announcement regarding clemency, he told reporters on November 23 that he did not intend to intervene.

Today, Johnson’s record behind bars is a testament to the way young people mature beyond their crimes. At Potosi, he is considered a “model inmate,” according to his clemency petition, which included dozens of letters from incarcerated men who described him as a mentor and role model. Among Johnson’s most vocal supporters are a group of educators who have maintained since his trial that Johnson was a good kid who committed a tragic act of violence on one of the worst days of his life. Pam Stanfield, his elementary school principal, who has grown especially close to Johnson over the years, described him as a devoted father whose relationship with Ramey “far exceeds what many fathers are able to do while living outside prison walls.”

In a phone call, Stanfield emphasized that Johnson had expressed deep remorse for killing McEntee. “He would give anything if he could go back and do something differently,” she said. “And yet he’s so much more than that.”

On the morning after Thanksgiving, Johnson’s attorneys organized a press conference to discuss Ramey’s fight to witness her father’s execution. Ramey had planned to give a statement but struggled to speak. She asked Smith, of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, to read the rest of what she’d written. “I have suffered so much loss in my life,” the statement read, recalling how Ramey had seen her mother killed when she was 4 years old. It was excruciating to think that she would not be there to see her sole surviving parent in his final moments. “If the state of Missouri thinks that my father’s actions at age 19 make him mature enough to be executed, then it makes no sense that under Missouri law an adult who is 19 is not mature enough to be present at that person’s execution.”

A federal judge rejected Ramey’s legal challenge later that evening. He found that Missouri had a valid interest in preventing teenagers from “witnessing death.” He cited a landmark Supreme Court case reining in life sentences for youth, which was rooted in the same scientific research that led to Roper in 2005. Young people “may be more inclined to act out in ways that are disruptive,” he wrote, threatening the “solemnity and decorum” of the execution.

“We are heartbroken for Khorry,” said Nolan, Johnson’s attorney. “Every aspect of this case is a tragedy, but we promise Khorry that we are not done fighting for her father.”

Update: November 30, 2022

Kevin Johnson was executed by lethal injection at 7:40 p.m. on November 29. He declined to make a last statement. U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the high court’s decision to reject a stay of execution. Johnson’s lawyer Shawn Nolan released the following statement:

Make no mistake about it, Missouri capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and killed Kevin because he is Black. Although the current prosecutor appointed by the court found that Kevin’s death sentence was the product of blatant racism by the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office, the governor and the Supreme Court of Missouri extinguished the special prosecutor’s pursuit of racial justice and allowed Kevin to be executed anyway. The law is supposed to punish people for what they do, not who they are. Yet, Missouri killed Kevin because of the color of his skin. Shame on all of them.

The post A Special Prosecutor Found Kevin Johnson’s Case Was Tainted by Racism. Missouri Is About to Kill Him Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s Thursday, November 10. We’re sitting face to face in a small visiting room inside the Browning Unit, part of the sprawling desert prison in Florence, Arizona. An hour southeast of Phoenix, the Arizona State Prison Complex is home to the state’s death row as well as the death chamber, which was recently reactivated following a long moratorium. After eight years without an execution, Arizona has killed two people in 2022. Hooper, 76, who most people call Hoop, is supposed to be the third.

The visitation table has a red and black checkerboard in the center and backgammon points on the side. The company that produced it boasts its rehabilitative ethos, designing furniture that creates a “normalized environment for inmates and staff alike.” But this is not a normal place — and Hooper was not brought here to be rehabilitated. He was brought here to be kept in total isolation until he is strapped to a gurney and killed. In the month that he’s been on “death watch,” Hooper has been under 24-hour surveillance, with someone documenting his every move from a few feet away. This despite the fact that there is a camera inside his cell, he points out. “All that is designed, I think, to wreck you psychologically.” So he tries to block it out, reading as much as possible.

Hooper, who is Black, wears thick glasses and a bright orange sweatshirt. He has short white hair. He is uncuffed but wearing leg irons, along with a belly chain around his waist. An officer in tactical gear has halfheartedly informed me that I’m entitled to a stab-proof vest, but he clearly considers it unnecessary. I get a waiver to sign instead.

Hooper bristles at the absurdity of it all. He has not gotten a single write-up in his years on Arizona’s death row. “I’m not a threat,” he says. But the staff has to follow the rules, so they shackle him even when he is taken to shower. Hooper doesn’t believe that they want to see him put to death. “They’ve never said it, because they can’t.”

I’ve come to see Hooper because he wants to tell his story. But he is not here to reflect upon his life. And he’s certainly not here to demonstrate redemption or remorse. He wants me to know that he is innocent: that he was railroaded by crooked cops, corrupt prosecutors, and a judge who saw the state’s misconduct firsthand but sentenced him to die anyway.

This is a story Hooper has been telling in court filings for 40 years. He was condemned to die for carrying out a contract killing in Phoenix on December 31, 1980. His case turned on eyewitness testimony — a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Research into eyewitness accounts and the science of memory has rendered such evidence increasingly unreliable in the decades since his trial, even more so in cases where the accused is Black and the victim is white.

But attempts to present that research have gone nowhere, most recently at Hooper’s clemency hearing, where prosecutors laid out an ugly criminal history that includes gang violence in his native Chicago and a guilty plea for manslaughter for killing his girlfriend in 1968. Hooper does not deny this. He says he paid the debt society demanded of him — but that these crimes don’t mean he should be executed for something he did not do.

Hooper has written down some thoughts on thick, unlined paper, which he gives me to read. There are choice words about outgoing Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who pushed to restart executions during a failed bid for Senate and requested Hooper’s death warrant — a “parting political stunt … to climb future political ladders” — and several more about his trial judge. But Hooper is a better talker than writer. If he could only get someone to listen.

Much of what Hooper says about his case is demonstrably true. He was one of a slew of defendants tried for a harrowing double murder that was infamous in its day. The state’s theory of the crime — a sprawling murder-for-hire conspiracy — was built on a mountain of misconduct, according to Hooper’s attorneys, from the repeated withholding of exculpatory evidence to cash payments to a key witness involved in the plot. Among the people convicted in the murders, some have been exonerated. Others have died behind bars. Of four death sentences, only Hooper’s remains.

Some have been exonerated. Others have died behind bars. Of four death sentences, only Hooper’s remains.

Today the best way to debunk or confirm his innocence claims would be to test key pieces of evidence linked to the crime. No forensic evidence ever pointed to Hooper. Of a dozen fingerprints found at the scene, only one was matched to anyone — one of the victims. A knife allegedly handled by Hooper has also been preserved. Just last year, the Arizona Legislature passed a law to allow advanced forensic testing in old cases where the technology to examine such evidence did not yet exist at the time of the crime. But the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has successfully argued against applying it in Hooper’s case.

According to federal public defender Kelly Culshaw, who was appointed to Hooper’s case earlier this year and has been scrambling to save his life, one of the first things he said to her was “we need DNA testing.” This was not a delay tactic, she added. At that time, there was no reason to expect that the attorney general would seek an execution date. Hooper’s federal habeas appeals had just concluded, and there were several other people on death row whose appeals had long been exhausted, putting them at the front of the line.

This fact seems to upset and unnerve Hooper as much as anything else. “How did I jump the line over all these guys?” he says. The obvious answer is politics. “Somebody made a phone call somewhere.” Whoever it was, he believes the state of Arizona is determined to stop his new lawyers from uncovering the truth about his case. “After I’m dead, the truth is buried with me.”

Legacy of Racism

Of the 190 people exonerated from death row in the United States to date, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 10 have come from Arizona. In the 40 years since Hooper went to trial, the risk that a person could be executed for a crime they did not commit has spurred many states to abolish the death penalty altogether. Last year, Virginia became the first Southern state to end capital punishment; upon signing the legislation, then-Gov. Ralph Northam noted that the “racism and discrimination of our past still echoes in our systems today.” He invoked the case of a Black man who came within days of execution only to be exonerated in 2000. “Can we really, truly be sure that there aren’t others?”

The answer is plainly no. Earlier this year, the National Registry of Exonerations released a major study that confirmed what many people know to be true: that Black people are especially vulnerable to being accused of a crime they did not commit. When it comes to murder convictions, Black people were found to be almost 80 percent more likely to be innocent. The report also found the rate of official misconduct to be much higher among murder exonerations involving Black defendants compared to cases involving white defendants.

At a glance, such findings bolster Hooper’s innocence claim. But his case is also uniquely complicated. Of almost 10,000 death sentences imposed in the United States since 1972, Hooper is one of a tiny fraction of people who have been sentenced to die in two different states. When he was convicted of capital murder in Arizona in December 1982, he had already been sentenced to die in Illinois. In both cases, Hooper was tried by all-white juries. In both cases, he insisted he was innocent.

To most, the chance of being wrongfully sentenced to death in two different states would seem impossibly far-fetched. Yet the two counties where Hooper was tried — Maricopa County and Cook County — have long been notorious for wrongful convictions and official misconduct. Half of Arizona’s 10 exonerations to date have come from Maricopa County.

The crimes themselves were similar but unrelated: The first was an execution-style triple murder in Chicago in November 1980; the second an execution-style double murder in Phoenix less than two months later. But the two capital cases were inextricably linked.

Although Hooper was well-known to Chicago police, they did not arrest him until they found out that he had been named as a suspect in the Arizona murder, then brutally interrogated him for both. Although Hooper gave statements implicating himself in both cases, he later recanted, saying he had been beaten and coerced. Arizona prosecutors never sought to introduce his alleged confession as evidence. The sole eyewitness to the Phoenix murders was flown to Chicago to identify Hooper at a lineup conducted by local police, later testifying during the sentencing phase of his Illinois trial. That conviction and death sentence would in turn be used to sentence him to death in Arizona.

“It took 32 years” to correct the miscarriage of justice in Illinois, Hooper tells me. He insists the same would be true in Arizona if he had more time.

To Hooper and his attorneys, the role of Chicago police is a critical part of the story. Cook County is known as the wrongful conviction capital of the country; in a 2021 report, the Death Penalty Information Center found that the county’s disproportionate number of death row exonerations were “directly related to endemic police corruption.”

Hooper has long argued that police rigged the lineup against him by singling him out in front of their witness. The state has denied this, and there is no videotape of the lineup that would offer clues. But a defense investigator who spent the 1980s working as a Chicago cop interviewed one of the Phoenix detectives involved in Hooper’s case decades later. According to the investigator’s declaration, the Phoenix detective recalled a colleague joking about how a Chicago detective had patted Hooper on his shoulder during the lineup.

In 2015, Illinois revamped lineups to make it harder for police to consciously or unconsciously tip off witnesses. More significantly, the state has spent the past several decades grappling with a crisis of wrongful convictions stemming from the sadistic police torture of Black men in Chicago under former Police Commander Jon Burge. In 2003, these revelations helped push then-Republican Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of all 167 people on death row. In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty entirely.

Hooper has long said that he, too, was brutalized by Chicago police.  One arresting officer “put his fingers down my throat” and threatened to suffocate Hooper with a plastic bag, he said in a sworn affidavit in 2006. Another officer, who described Hooper as one of “the most vicious men you will ever see” in the press, was accused of electrocuting suspects while working as Burge’s partner in the 1970s. Although he was granted immunity from prosecution in 2005, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission has since found allegations of his abuse credible in at least one case.

Hooper gets agitated talking about the Chicago police. But he smiles slightly when I ask if he remembers the moment his Illinois death sentence was commuted. He was on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center when a neighbor told him to turn on the TV. Ten years later, Hooper’s Illinois conviction would be vacated altogether by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which admonished the Illinois Supreme Court for dismissing the evidence of racial bias in his case. By then, he had been transferred to Arizona’s death row.

“It took 32 years” to correct the miscarriage of justice in Illinois, Hooper tells me. He insists that the same would be true in Arizona if he had more time. This is why he wants to tell his story. “Even if they got me, at least it’s out there.”

Murray Hooper, third from left, is shown in a lineup conducted by the Chicago Police Department in February 1981.

Photo: Murray Hooper appellate record

The Conspiracy

Around 7:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 1980, Verna Kelly and her husband arrived for a small party at the home of William “Pat” Redmond and his wife, Marilyn. They brought a chocolate pie and a bottle of whiskey. The Redmonds’ house was located on a cul-de-sac in “a quiet north Phoenix neighborhood of luxury homes,” as the Arizona Republic later wrote.

Upon letting themselves in, the Kellys found 47-year-old Marilyn Redmond on the living room floor. Her hands were taped behind her back, and she was severely injured, bleeding from her jaw from a gunshot wound. After cutting her free, the couple found an even more horrific scene in the master bedroom: Marilyn’s 70-year-old mother, Helen Phelps, and Pat Redmond were bound, gagged, and lifeless. Both had been shot in the head. Pat’s neck had been slashed from ear to ear.

Marilyn Redmond initially said the attackers were three Black men. A Phoenix police officer who arrived just before 8 p.m. asked if she could tell him what happened. “She said very slowly, with some difficulty, ‘Three black men came in and robbed us,’” he later testified. A detective who spoke to Redmond while paramedics attended to her said that although she was in and out of consciousness, she was able to answer some questions. After initially telling him that the perpetrators were “all negro males,” according to his report, she clarified that one was white. “She said that two or all three of them wore masks but could not be sure,” the detective added.

Redmond eventually gave more detailed descriptions, especially of the white man. He was clean cut, in a white shirt and “very good-looking suit,” she told an officer at the hospital. In a police report written on New Year’s Day, a Phoenix detective described asking her if she would be able to recognize any of the suspects. “She shook her head negative, stating that she was afraid to look at them.”

Nevertheless, three people were swiftly apprehended and charged: Hooper and William Bracy, both Chicago gang members who had been in town in early December, and a former Phoenix cop named Edward McCall. Although the gunmen had taken money and jewelry, suggesting a burglary gone wrong, in the months that followed, the state adopted a more sinister and convoluted theory of the crime: that the trio of hitmen had been hired to kill Pat Redmond to gain control of his printing business, Graphic Dimensions, which stood to gain lucrative contracts with Las Vegas casinos. At the heart of this theory was Joyce Lukezic, the wife of Redmond’s business partner who had allegedly masterminded the plot.

Although the gunmen had taken money and jewelry, suggesting a burglary gone wrong, the state adopted a more sinister theory of the crime.

But Lukezic insisted that she was innocent — and there was good reason to listen. The state’s theory stemmed almost entirely from a single, highly dubious source: a man named Arnold Merrill, who had himself been implicated in the plot and whose long rap sheet included a series of home invasions. In exchange for immunity for those crimes — and to avoid a death sentence for his role in the murders — Merrill provided a sweeping narrative upon which Maricopa County prosecutors based their theory of the case.

The man responsible for securing Merrill’s cooperation was Dan Ryan, an investigator with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, who led the probe into the murders. The appellate record in Hooper’s case shows that Ryan arranged for extraordinary incentives for Merrill that were withheld from the defense, including help with car payments, an illicit arrangement for him to receive Valium in jail, and secret conjugal visits with his wife. To ensure deals offered to Merrill and another cooperating witness, according to the appellate record, Ryan falsified pre-sentence reports to hide their criminal histories.

In a brief phone call, Ryan refused to discuss his conduct in Hooper’s case, saying he had “taken a beating” in the press. As for Hooper, “I’ll be quite concise. He’s gonna die,” Ryan said. “I’m not.”

Ryan’s conduct eventually backfired in Lukezic’s case, leading to two retrials and ultimately her acquittal. Lukezic’s ordeal later became a TV movie based on her memoir, “False Arrest.” The movie depicts Ryan as an unscrupulous bully who, under pressure to solve the high-profile crime, threatened and coerced witnesses. In the culminating scenes, Lukezic’s new attorney dramatically exposes the state’s malfeasance and clears her name. Her trial judge smiles benevolently as Lukezic is found not guilty, believing justice to have prevailed.

But Hollywood had little to say about the rest of the defendants or whether their convictions may also have been fatally flawed. Hooper remembers the series as “garbage.” The biggest difference between his case and Lukezic’s, he said, was that she was a wealthy white woman who could afford to pay the enormous legal fees it took to exonerate her.

By the time Lukezic was acquitted in December 1985, Hooper, Bracy, and McCall had been sentenced to death — and Ryan had resigned from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. According to the Arizona Republic, the investigator became “an embarrassment to the office” and a liability in the district attorney’s bid for reelection. Yet prosecutors fought to keep their convictions intact, even as their larger case continued to fall apart. Robert Cruz, the man who allegedly hired Hooper and Bracy, was tried a total of five times before ultimately being acquitted. Today he appears in the National Registry of Exonerations.

William Bracy, left, Murray Hooper, and public defender J. Grant Woods listen in court as the jury returns its verdict on Dec. 24, 1982.

Photo: John Williard/ Arizona Republic

A Controversial Case

Hooper and Bracy were the last to be tried, in the fall of 1982. The presiding judge was Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Cecil Patterson, who had been appointed to the bench two years earlier. He was the first Black Superior Court judge in Arizona. Hooper believes that Patterson was chosen to give the appearance of fairness at a trial otherwise rooted in racism. Of a panel of 120 prospective jurors, only two were Black. None ended up on the jury.

In a phone call, Patterson, who is now in his 80s, dismissed the notion that he was chosen for the trial due to his race. “That never concerned me at all because my viewpoint was that of being the best professional that I could be,” he said. “And if I was able to do that, they would get the best trial possible.”

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A death penalty case tried in Arizona today would include two lawyers representing a defendant, with at least one ideally having experience in a capital case. Hooper was represented by one attorney, Maricopa County public defender Grant Woods, who was just a year out of law school. Despite attempts to sever Hooper’s case from Bracy’s, the two were tried together in the thick of ongoing controversy over alleged misconduct in the preceding trials. Lukezic’s trial judge had brought contempt charges against Ryan and Maricopa prosecutors for repeatedly withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense. They were eventually acquitted.

The controversy did not stop there. No sooner had opening statements begun than the defense asked for a mistrial after Deputy Maricopa County District Attorney Joseph Brownlee told the jury that key witnesses had positively identified Hooper and Bracy from a pair of photographs — evidence that Patterson had not yet deemed admissible. “I am going to consider seriously citing you for contempt,” Patterson told the prosecutors. He would later rule against admitting the evidence. But he denied the motion for a mistrial.

Hooper’s trial had been underway for more than a week when Woods unsuccessfully moved for a mistrial again upon discovering new information that had never been disclosed. Around 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1980, the local sheriff’s office had received an anonymous phone call offering information about the murders. The caller, who was never identified, said that three Black men responsible for the killings had been arrested by Phoenix police earlier that night. Yet the men were never seriously considered as suspects. Their fingerprints were never compared to those taken from the Redmond home. Nor were police reports or a large collection of photographs taken of the men provided to the defense before trial. Woods learned of their existence while questioning a lieutenant on the stand.

In a phone call, Brownlee said that he never withheld exculpatory evidence in Hooper’s case. He also denied any racial bias during the trial, noting that Patterson was a “well-respected Black judge.” He sent me the Superior Court order denying forensic testing to Hooper, which found that such evidence would not have made a difference at trial even if DNA or fingerprints had been matched to someone else.

The defense’s allegations of misconduct did not necessarily lead to bad press at the time of the trial. One local columnist lionized Ryan as a former FBI agent “built like a pro football pulling guard” who chose police work despite his great personal wealth. “Ryan feels so strongly about this case that at one point, he loaned a state witness his own money,” the columnist wrote. In October, Phoenix Magazine published a profile titled “Joe Brownlee: A Prosecutor Who Plays Hardball,” quoting the prosecutor calling himself a “champion of the underdog” — and including an anonymous quote questioning the contempt charges against him. The article’s timing led the defense to file a motion for a change of venue, which was rejected.

Prosecutors centered their case on the eyewitness account of Marilyn Redmond. A Phoenix homicide detective who accompanied Redmond to Chicago testified that Redmond had picked Hooper and Bracy out of two lineups. Yet neither the lineups nor any of the related interviews regarding her identifications were recorded by police. This was in contrast to a videotape in which Redmond had failed to identify McCall. On cross-examination, Bracy’s attorney, public defender Steve Rempe, confronted the detective about the failure to record the positive identifications. “Now, we have the most crucial, the most important, the lady who was shot in the head, the person who would have the most knowledge as to who did the shooting. Why didn’t you bother to take the simple procedure of tape recording her so we would not have to argue about what she said or what she didn’t say?” Rempe asked. The detective said it would not have made a difference.

But such moments were no match for Redmond herself. As the star witness for the state, she was extraordinarily compelling, a woman who had not only lost her husband and mother, but also survived to identify their killers after being left for dead. Redmond confidently identified Hooper and Bracy as the gunmen.

On Christmas Eve, the jury convicted Hooper and Bracy on all counts.

“That should tell people something, that it’s possible to lock a person up and not let them breathe fresh air.”

After his client’s conviction, Woods was abruptly replaced by a different attorney for the sentencing phase of the trial. The lawyer presented no mitigating evidence. In February 1983, on the day Patterson was to sentence his client, Woods reemerged to address the court. He urged Patterson not to “order a murder” as the masterminds in these killings had. “What the government is asking you to do is just as vicious, just as cruel, just as cold and calculated and premeditated because it’s thought out,” he said. “I urge you to consider that when you are ultimately judged, it will be on that ground.” Patterson was unmoved. He sentenced Hooper to die.

Patterson said that the decision to sentence Hooper and Bracy to death was a heavy burden. Still, he has no regrets about his handling of the case. “Let me tell you the overriding conclusion that I still carry with me,” he said. “It went through so many appellate processes in the state and in the federal system and not a single one of them reversed. That to me was the proof of the pudding.”

Nevertheless, he was surprised to turn on the news and discover that the Arizona attorney general had requested an execution date for Hooper. He did not say he opposed the execution. But he was aware of Hooper’s lack of infractions on death row. In 40 years, he had been held securely without ever setting foot on the street, Patterson said. “This is close as I’m gonna say a thing about the death penalty. That should tell people something, that it’s possible to lock a person up and not let them breathe fresh air.”

An illustration shows the all-white jury in the first-degree murder trial of William Bracy and Murray Hooper in late December 1982.

Illustration: Kee Rash

Trying to Survive

In his first several years under dual death sentences, Hooper focused much of his appeals on challenging his Illinois conviction. In 1987, his Chicago trial judge rejected a challenge to his all-white jury, writing that he did not “detect or find evidence of a mind to discriminate.” That judge would later go to prison for accepting bribes in murder cases.

In the meantime, Arizona’s death penalty law was being challenged for giving judges, rather than juries, the power to determine whether to sentence a defendant to death. In 1988, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared Arizona’s death penalty law unconstitutional on these grounds. But the decision was short-lived. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the ruling, clearing the way for executions to resume in the state. Although there were some 100 people under a death sentence in Arizona by then, nobody had died in the execution chamber since 1963. Politicians started pushing to restart executions.

Central to this effort was an unlikely figure: Hooper’s former defense lawyer, Grant Woods. After a couple of years as a public defender, Woods entered the state attorney general’s race as a death penalty true believer and won. He was the youngest attorney general in the country. He decried the frivolous ways in which lawyers sought to forestall their clients’ executions, declaring it his mission to reopen the death chamber as soon as possible. In 1992, he personally witnessed the state’s first execution in 29 years.

In a special report on the death penalty, the Tucson Citizen contrasted Woods’s hard-line position on capital punishment with his impassioned plea to spare Hooper’s life. Woods told the paper that he’d merely been doing his job. “Some of the best work I ever did as an attorney was for him,” he said. But Hooper felt betrayed by his former lawyer, who had told him repeatedly that nobody deserved to take another person’s life. “I honestly felt at the time he meant that,” he told the newspaper.

Rempe, who represented Bracy at trial, does not remember being surprised by Woods’s death penalty push. “He was a politician,” he said. “That explains some things.”

By the time Woods ended his tenure as attorney general in 1999, 19 people had been killed in Arizona’s death chamber. Three years later, in Ring v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the question of whether Arizona’s sentencing scheme was constitutional. This time it concluded that juries, not judges, should decide whether a person should be sentenced to death, overturning its own 1990 decision. But the ruling was not retroactive. It would make no difference in Hooper’s case.

Hooper’s Illinois death sentence was commuted the following year. But it was not until 2006, after years in general population, that he was moved to Arizona’s death row in the dead of night. His arrival to the desert prison was crushing. In Illinois, he had freedom of movement, recreation, and contact visits with family. In Arizona, he had none of those things.

“He was very concerned that once I started to learn about his case that I would think that he did those things.”

It was during this period that Hooper began corresponding with Molly Keogh, a Delaware mental health therapist who had found him through a pen pal program offered by her church. Keogh was no stranger to the death penalty. As part of her job, she had once evaluated people on Delaware’s death row. Some of those men were eventually executed, including one whom she believed to be innocent.

Keogh’s correspondence with Hooper developed into a friendship. Letters led to regular phone calls; they discussed books and politics and especially Keogh’s family. “He very interested in my life. My family, my husband, my children,” she said. He thrived on hearing about family gatherings, wanting to know every detail. “It really excited him to just hear about people living their lives, you know?” For a long time, they did not discuss his case. “He was very concerned that once I started to learn about his case that I would think that he did those things,” she said. When they eventually did broach the topic, Keogh said, “What he wanted me to know is that he did not do it. And that was as simple as that.”

Shortly after Hooper got his execution date, Keogh traveled to Arizona with her daughter to meet him in person. He was taller than she expected, which made them laugh. But otherwise, it was like any other conversation, picking up where they’d left off. Afterward, she went with her daughter to the Grand Canyon, later sending photos to Hooper. “He just talks about that like it was the greatest thing.”

Hooper seemed reluctant to discuss his family during our visit. Along with his parents, three of his four siblings are now deceased. He has a brother who has been in touch with him since he got his execution date. But he does not have the means to travel to Arizona, nor does Hooper want him to. “He’s just trying to survive,” he said.

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A week before I met Hooper, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency voted to deny him clemency following a six-hour hearing. Keogh spoke briefly via a video link. She described Hooper as a steadfast friend and contrasted him with some of the broken men she had met on Delaware’s death row, who had difficulty showing compassion for others. “That is not the case with Murray Hooper.”

Hooper did not attend the hearing. Neither did Marilyn Redmond, who is now 89 years old. A prosecutor for the state said she no longer wanted to be involved in the case. In recent months, Redmond had undergone surgery related to complications she still suffers from the injuries inflicted decades ago. The prosecutor read an old letter from Redmond, which the office had kept on file. She stood by her identification of Hooper. “Any mention of clemency is unthinkable and I know you will not consider it.”

Hooper’s lawyers reiterated his innocence. They repeated what Hooper maintained at trial: that he was in Chicago on New Year’s Eve 1980. They emphasized the state’s incentivized witnesses, the lack of physical evidence linking him to the scene, and the danger of relying on eyewitness identification to put a man to death. They also shared a disturbing discovery they had made on the eve of the hearing, which pointed to another piece of evidence that had been withheld at trial. In the state’s letter to the clemency board, prosecutors had written that before Marilyn Redmond identified Hooper in Chicago, she had previously failed to identify him in a “paper lineup.” No photo lineup had never been disclosed.

An expert who testified about the science of memory and eyewitness identification told the board that he considered this new information “very important.” Scientific research has shown that memories of traumatic experiences are susceptible to being shaped by “post-event information,” he explained. Despite Redmond’s detailed trial testimony, there was considerable evidence that her original memory of the crime had been extremely hazy. If it was true that she had seen a photo of Hooper but failed to identify him, it was further proof that her subsequent selection of Hooper in Chicago was not based on a strong memory but on other factors.

But at the hearing, prosecutors dismissed the line in the letter as an honest mistake. It was referring to a composite drawing that had been shown to Redmond, they said, insisting that there was no photo lineup. Culshaw, Hooper’s lead attorney, filed an emergency motion asking for access to the state’s files.

On Monday, that motion was denied. “This court accepts the state’s explanation,” the judge wrote.

Update: November 16, 2022
Murray Hooper was executed by lethal injection on November 16. His time of death was 10:34 a.m., according to the Arizona Department of Corrections. According to reports from media witnesses, the execution was delayed for 25 minutes while prison personnel struggled to find a vein, ultimately inserting a catheter into his femoral vein. His last words were, “It’s all been said, let it be done. Don’t be sad for me. Don’t cry. I’ll see you later. Let’s go.”

The post Staring Down the Execution Chamber at 76, Murray Hooper Still Says He’s Innocent appeared first on The Intercept.

R.J. was only 6 weeks old when he first visited Texas death row with his father, Rodrick Reed Sr. By then, his uncle had been there for almost 20 years — and had come close to execution once. In 2019, as R.J.’s third birthday approached and Reed faced another execution date, their hometown newspaper in Bastrop, Texas, printed a front-page photo of R.J. standing in front of the Supreme Court, where his family called on the justices to intervene. Their pleas were rejected. But Reed’s execution was called off at the last minute anyway.

Now, the justices had finally decided to consider Reed’s case. The family made the trip once more to Washington, D.C., to attend the oral argument. The outcome will determine whether Reed can seek DNA testing of key crime scene evidence through the federal courts.

“My family’s been fighting this my whole life,” said Reed’s niece, Brittany. Growing up in Bastrop with the last name Reed wasn’t always easy. But things had started to change, she said. The last execution date brought a wave of protests in support of her uncle, fueled in part by celebrity advocates like Kim Kardashian. More recently, a nine-day evidentiary hearing revealed compelling new evidence pointing to Reed’s innocence — including witnesses who tried to speak to the police years earlier but were ignored. “A lot of people are able to see the real truth,” Brittany said.

Reed, who is Black, was sent to death row in 1998 for killing a 19-year-old white woman named Stacey Stites. Her body was found on the side of a country road outside Bastrop, and sperm recovered from Stites’s body was matched to Reed. Prosecutors called this evidence the “Cinderella’s slipper” revealing her killer. But Reed insisted he was innocent. He said he’d been having a secret affair with Stites, who was engaged to a white police officer. That officer, Jimmy Fennell, denied the possibility of an affair, claiming that he and Stites had a loving relationship and she didn’t know anyone named Rodney Reed. Fennell was never seriously considered as a suspect, yet there was evidence from the start that he might have been responsible for Stites’s death.

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This evidence had only gotten stronger over time. Friends of Stites’s confirmed that she and Reed knew each other, and law enforcement colleagues of Fennell’s said he had discovered the affair and was furious that Stites was involved with a Black man. Fennell was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman while on duty. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it. Yet Texas courts have repeatedly blocked Reed’s efforts to win a new trial.

Although Reed’s family was cautiously hopeful the Supreme Court justices would rule in his favor, they learned long ago not to stay silent while leaving his fate to the courts. No matter what happened that morning, Rodrick said before ascending the courthouse steps, he and his family would keep fighting. “There’s a lot of things still yet to come.”

Rodney Reed’s nephew R.J., 6, stands with faith leaders and supporters at a prayer rally organized by Death Penalty Action in front of the Supreme Court on Oct. 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Years of Legal Wrangling

The road to the Supreme Court was long and arduous. By the time the justices agreed to review a narrow legal question, Reed had sought the high court’s intervention numerous times. In a pointed dissent from the court’s refusal to consider his case in 2020, Justice Sonia Sotomayor highlighted the grave questions that had been raised over Reed’s guilt over more than two decades — and the repeated refusal of Texas courts to confront them. “Reed has presented a substantial body of evidence that, if true, casts doubt on the veracity and scientific validity of the evidence on which Reed’s conviction rests,” she wrote. “There is no escaping the pall of uncertainty over Reed’s conviction.”

Texas’s case against Reed has all but collapsed. Medical evidence suggesting Stites was killed on the morning of April 23, 1996, while she was on her way to work has been debunked; experts say she almost certainly died the night before, when she was at home with Fennell. A stream of witnesses with no connection to Reed have come forward with stories about Stites and Reed’s relationship and Fennell’s propensity for violence, flipping the state’s narrative and pointing to Fennell as a more likely killer.

“There is no escaping the pall of uncertainty over Reed’s conviction.”

Texas has rebuffed this evidence. While prosecutors haven’t offered anything meaningful to challenge the new witness accounts, they nonetheless insist that Reed’s conviction is righteous.

Testing physical evidence for DNA could resolve the lingering questions. But while the state has long pointed to the sperm DNA as key evidence that Reed is guilty, it has resisted testing crucial pieces of crime scene evidence that should, at least theoretically, bolster its case. Chief among the untested items are two lengths of a braided leather belt used to strangle Stites. Years of legal wrangling over Reed’s request to test this evidence is what finally landed his case before the Supreme Court.

In 2014, Reed filed a motion in state district court seeking testing of the belt and other items under the state’s post-conviction DNA testing statute, known as Chapter 64. Although the statute was passed in response to several high-profile embarrassments, many Texas defendants have struggled to access testing, in large part thanks to rulings from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state court-of-last-resort in criminal cases.

The CCA has long had a reputation for hostility to claims of innocence and efforts to secure DNA testing. Since Chapter 64 was enacted in 2001, the legislature has repeatedly amended it to address court rulings that severely narrowed eligibility, an approach lawyers say neuters the law. At times, the court’s rulings have been confounding. In one case, the CCA concluded that to obtain DNA testing, a defendant would first have to prove that DNA existed on the evidence in question — which is nearly impossible to do without DNA testing.

During a hearing on Reed’s DNA request in November 2014, prosecutors took a similar position, arguing that Reed could not prove DNA existed on the belt used to strangle Stites. The state also argued that because the items were handled by multiple people at Reed’s trial (including prosecutors) and then commingled during storage, the evidence was too contaminated to render any probative DNA results. Reed’s experts have countered this notion, explaining in detail why neither circumstance is particularly unique nor problematic.

Nonetheless, the district court ruled against Reed, writing that the state’s case against him was “strong,” meaning that even if DNA testing of the belt had been done before his 1998 trial, there was “no reasonable probability” that Reed would have been acquitted of Stites’s murder. The judge also concluded that Reed was seeking testing solely to delay his execution. Reed appealed to the CCA. Although it initially sent the case back to the district court, asking the judge to clarify his findings, the CCA ultimately affirmed the lower court’s ruling in April 2017.

Under Chapter 64, DNA testing can be ordered by the court only if the evidence “is in a condition making DNA testing possible” and has been “subjected to a chain of custody sufficient to establish that it has not been substituted, tampered with, replaced, or altered in any material respect.” The Bastrop County clerk, who is the custodian of evidence, testified that the items had been secured “under lock and key,” and none of them had been tampered with or altered in any way. But the CCA glossed over this and instead determined the evidence had been “contaminated” — a concept not contained in the statute. Reed asked the court to reconsider its ruling; the CCA denied the rehearing request via postcard roughly six months later.

Although the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing, if a state does provide access to testing, the process for obtaining it must be fair. The court has determined that a defendant may file a civil rights suit in federal court to challenge a process that is unfair. Reed filed such a suit in August 2019. The suit was dismissed, however, when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was filed nearly three years too late.

Under the statute, Reed had a two-year window to file his federal claim after he was denied testing. According to the appeals court, Reed should have filed the suit in 2014 after he was denied testing at the trial court level. Reed appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that filing back in 2014 would have been premature since the CCA hadn’t yet considered his appeal. If the CCA had reversed the trial court’s decision and allowed DNA testing, then the whole matter would have been resolved — and taking the fight to federal court would have been a waste of time and resources. This spring, the Supreme Court said it would take the case. While the question before the court is technical, the consequences for defendants, and particularly those on death row, are substantial.

Rodney Reed’s mother, Sandra Reed, wipes her eye during a prayer rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 11, 2022.

Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Moving the Goalposts

The oral argument in Reed v. Goertz began well after noon. The first case before the court that day, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, consumed more than two hours, with lively back-and-forth between the justices and attorneys that included meditations on morality. “How broadly would you define immoral?” Justice Clarence Thomas asked a lawyer for the Humane Society of America, which argued that bans on gestation crates and other forms of animal cruelty followed a “moral tradition” in the United States.

If there was any irony to be found in the time spent pondering the confinement of farm animals set for slaughter versus the ethics of executing a human being who has spent most of his adult life in a cage, it went unacknowledged. By the time Reed’s attorney rose to make his case, much of the courtroom had cleared out, including the press section. The energy was of a workplace meeting where most people were thinking about lunch.

Much of the discussion focused on Texas’s dickering over when the statute of limitations clock began to tick.

The state has variously changed its position on this question. Texas has argued that the clock began after the state district judge first denied DNA testing in 2014; that it started two years later, after the CCA asked the district judge to revise his findings; and that it began in April 2017, when the CCA issued its opinion inventing the non-contamination rule. But where it definitely did not start, Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone told the court, was the rehearing date in October 2017, when the CCA denied Reed’s request to reconsider the case. Generally speaking, a person can take their legal fight to federal court only after a state claim has been exhausted. The rehearing denial was the court’s final word on the matter, closing any meaningful avenue for redress within the state’s legal system. This is when Reed’s lawyers say the statute of limitations clock should begin to run.

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Under any scenario but the last, Reed would have filed his federal civil rights case after the statute of limitations expired. That seemed to be the state’s true goal: Move the goalposts just enough to eliminate Reed’s ability to seek DNA testing through the federal courts, even if doing so would create an arbitrary rule destined to create a confusing morass for everyone else. Many of the justices’ questions homed in on the logic of Stone’s position.

“Can I focus your attention on the difference between the date of the court of appeals decision versus the rehearing date?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked. “Why should we prefer your view?”

Reed’s request that the CCA reconsider its ruling didn’t matter, Stone responded. “Rehearing changed nothing.”

“That’s just because rehearing was denied,” Justice Elena Kagan interjected. If it had been granted and the court had revised its previous decision, then Reed might be in a different position, which “we don’t know about until the end of the court of appeals process.”

“That seems like an awful waste of time.”

Stone said his proposed rules would take that into account. If rehearing had been granted and something had changed, then the statute of limitations would start running then. But that would create different clocks for different scenarios, Kagan pointed out. “Why isn’t the simpler rule just to say, ‘We don’t know what the authoritative construction of the court of appeals is until the court of appeals process is concluded.’ The end.”

Sotomayor noted that Texas has also said Reed should have pursued his federal court claim back in 2014, after the district court first ruled against him. Yes, Stone said. But if he does that and simultaneously appeals in state court, should the federal court wait to address Reed’s civil rights case? Sotomayor asked.

“It need not,” Stone replied.

“But it can?” Sotomayor asked.

“If the parties request that it wait —” Stone began.

“That seems like an awful waste of time,” Sotomayor said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson echoed this concern. If the federal court would pause consideration of a civil rights case to allow state courts to weigh in first, how would Stone’s proposed rules makes any sense? “What’s the point?” she asked, nodding to Reed’s argument that the state’s position seemed designed “just to keep a prisoner from ultimately being able to bring a federal claim.”

Chapter 64 contains a process for appealing a district court decision to the CCA, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted. How could Reed have gone to federal court in 2014 if he didn’t yet know what the CCA was going to do — and thus whether the law was applied in an unfair way? “I just don’t understand how the cause exists until the procedures have failed him,” she said.

Stone tried to explain but ultimately hit on this: The point of this dispute was to decide whether individuals like Reed who want to seek DNA testing through the federal courts can draw things out by availing “themselves of endless procedure in state courts.”

The state’s position seemed designed “just to keep a prisoner from ultimately being able to bring a federal claim.”

But Reed was just availing himself of the provisions of Chapter 64, Barrett noted. “The claim is that the procedure, as you said, was fundamentally unfair, but it’s not fundamentally unfair if the CCA could have corrected any mistake that the trial court had made, right?”

Chapter 64 provides for an appeal to the CCA, Stone said, but it says nothing about seeking rehearing in that court. (Despite the fact that rehearing requests are part of the normal CCA process.) All Reed was doing, he said, was trying to extend the time to file “for the purposes of, candidly, forestalling imposition of a capital sentence.”

Such dilatory behavior deprived the state of being able to retry Reed if he were to prevail in the courts, he said, because prosecution witnesses might die or develop dementia. Stone brought up the recent evidentiary hearing, claiming that Reed’s evidence was unreliable and his defenders were exploiting his innocence claim to delay execution. “Additional delay harms the state’s ability to be able to redress this if, for example, he is entitled to a new trial for one reason or another,” Stone said, “which he most emphatically is not.”

Parker Rider-Longmaid, who was arguing on Reed’s behalf, took aim at Stone’s assertions. The CCA called off Reed’s planned execution in 2019 not because of his Chapter 64 claim, but because of the mountain of evidence that now points to Fennell, not Reed, as Stites’s killer. That evidence is still under review. In addition to the troubling evidence Sotomayor laid out in her 2020 opinion, he noted, there is evidence that “Fennell admitted to killing Stites because he discovered she was sleeping with a Black man; that Fennell threatened to kill Stites if he caught her cheating; that Fennell made inculpatory statements at Stites’s funeral; and that Fennell and Stites’s relationship was fraught,” he said. These “are all serious things we think the court should consider.”

After the oral argument concluded, Reed’s mother, Sandra, exited the courtroom with her son and grandson. Members of Reed’s legal team held her hands for support. She looked tired and a bit overwhelmed. For more than two decades she had told her story to anyone who would listen, speaking at countless rallies and interviews. In recent years, Rodrick had taken over much of the public speaking. But Sandra remained a constant advocate for her son. Back outside, an attorney thanked her for being there. “I wouldn’t have missed it,” she said.

A ruling is expected in 2023. But there was no waiting on the court. The family’s next stop was an event at Howard University later that day, where Brittany joined her father in telling Reed’s story. However the fight for DNA testing might end, the truth was on their side, she said. As the evidentiary hearing showed, what’s hidden in the dark “always comes to the light.”

The post Texas Invents New Barriers to DNA Testing While Blaming Rodney Reed for Delay Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.

But that never happened. Jones’s moment of victory instead gave way to a whole different nightmare. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office fought to undo Burgess’s order, appealing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May, the justices ruled in the case, known as Shinn v. Ramirez. They found that Burgess should never have used the new evidence to overturn Jones’s conviction, reinstating his death sentence. Burgess, who announced his retirement last year, returned to Arizona from his home in Alaska in early September for a hearing to decide what should happen next.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Burgess emerged looking almost unrecognizable. Previously clean-cut, he now sported a bushy mustache and beard, along with a relaxed demeanor. For a man whose careful jurisprudence in Jones’s case had been brushed aside by a right-wing court whose legitimacy is increasingly in question, Burgess struck an affable note. “It’s been a while,” he smiled. “I’ve gotten older. My hair has gotten grayer. But it’s good to see all of you again.”

Soft laughter rippled through the courtroom. But Jones remained serious. He was 64, almost the same age as Burgess. For him, getting older meant getting closer to dying behind bars — or on a gurney.

Jones’s spirits lifted when he turned to scan the courtroom. The benches behind him were filled with former members of his legal team, along with friends and relatives. His grown children, Brandie, Andrew, and James, had arrived together to support him. The three were just kids when Jones was sentenced to death in 1995. Now they were in their 30s, with families of their own.

“Innocence is not enough.”

The purpose of the hearing, Burgess said, was to devise a “road map on how to proceed.” The Supreme Court had not only dissolved years of litigation in Jones’s case, but also rolled back its own case law, closing the courthouse door on countless other incarcerated people who received poor lawyering at trial. Although the ruling adversely impacted defendants regardless of whether their guilt was in question, Arizona’s argument was perhaps most devastating for Jones: “Innocence is not enough.”

Jones still had a number of potential legal paths, although none of them were promising. “I look at this as a series of bad choices,” Jones’s longtime attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Cary Sandman, told Burgess. From Sandman’s point of view, the most important thing now was for any litigation to “move forward as quickly as possible.”

He acknowledged that this might be unrealistic. The high court’s ruling against Jones was the culmination of litigation dating back at least a decade, when Jones had sought to avail himself of a different Supreme Court decision handed down in 2012. In Martinez v. Ryan, the justices offered a lifeline to incarcerated people who had previously been doomed by ineffective assistance of counsel. Under the strict procedural rules governing federal appeals, if a defendant  failed to challenge their conviction on that basis in state court, they would be subsequently prohibited from doing so in federal court. But Martinez allowed for an exception. If this failure was due to a state post-conviction lawyer’s own incompetence, the Supreme Court held, a petitioner should have a chance to seek relief.

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Jones’s case seemed like a perfect test case for Martinez. Accused in 1994 of raping and murdering his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Jones was appointed trial attorneys who failed him at every turn. The child, Rachel Gray, had died from a sharp blow to her abdomen, which led to a fatal case of peritonitis. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department singled out Jones as the sole suspect before an autopsy had identified her cause of death; prosecutors based their case on a narrow time period during which Jones had been seen with the child the day before she died. Jones’s attorneys never investigated the state’s medical evidence in order to challenge it at trial. If they had, they would have discovered — as Jones’s federal defenders did years later — that the state’s timeline was medically impossible.

It was not until 2017 that experts called by Jones’s attorneys were allowed to debunk this evidence in court. But the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn rendered the new medical evidence moot. Now, Sandman said hesitantly, he was inclined to do what Arizona prosecutors had long insisted was his only legitimate option — ask Burgess to review the incomplete evidence developed by Jones’s post-conviction attorney. It seemed like a futile gesture. Like his trial attorneys, Jones’s post-conviction lawyer had failed to investigate the medical evidence that sent Jones to death row. This was the very problem Martinez was supposed to fix.

What if I don’t rule in your favor? Burgess asked. At that point, Sandman said, he would ask Burgess to pause any further federal litigation so that he could pursue an innocence claim in Arizona state court. It was a long shot. And it would prompt protest from the state. Although Arizona’s solicitor general had cited Arizona’s statute as the more appropriate vehicle for Jones to assert his innocence during the Supreme Court oral argument, the state had since argued that Jones should not have that option after all.

The back and forth between Sandman and Burgess cast Jones’s predicament into sharp relief. The possibility that Jones would survive another round of litigation seemed increasingly remote. For that reason, Sandman said, the best thing to do would be to settle Jones’s case.

“This has been a very difficult time,” Sandman said. Since the Martinez ruling first opened the door to his client, his legal team had spent years working in good faith to get evidence of Jones’s wrongful conviction back into court. After hearing all the evidence, that court found that Jones had been “convicted of the most vicious, serious crimes and sentenced to death without a fair trial,” Sandman said. Yet this finding didn’t seem to matter to the state of Arizona. Legal arguments aside, Sandman said, “I’m troubled by the moral aspect of where we’re at in this case.”

“I began my legal training 50 years ago,” Sandman continued. “Perhaps I’m a bit weary and I apologize for that. … But I do think that it’s important for someone on behalf of Mr. Jones to say: Why can’t he be provided a fair trial?”

Rachel Gray’s gravesite at the East Lawn Palms Cemetery in Tucson, Ariz., in June 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Nobody Had Time

Since the central evidence against Jones was debunked, the question of what happened to Rachel Gray has largely faded into the background. Although the Arizona attorney general applauded the Supreme Court’s ruling as a victory for victims, Rachel’s mother said years ago that she no longer believed Jones killed her daughter. In their zeal to salvage the case against Jones, state prosecutors have gone to extreme lengths to justify his death sentence, at one point arguing that even if Jones was unaware of the severity of Rachel’s internal injuries, jurors would have condemned him to die for failing to take Rachel to the hospital.

If prosecutors wanted to uncover the truth, there was an obvious way to try. Since 2014, the Pima County Attorney’s Office has been home to a Conviction and Sentencing Integrity Unit, or CSIU, whose purpose is to reinvestigate possible wrongful convictions. Jones’s attorneys have repeatedly asked the office to consider his case to no avail. When Sandman reached out to the unit’s director in 2017, he was directed to the Pima County Attorney’s website, which stated that the unit “does not evaluate cases that are still proceeding on any form of appeal.” This would disqualify all death penalty cases, which involve litigation until the end.

After the Supreme Court’s decision placed Jones back on track for execution, it seemed like the right moment for the office to finally consider his case. But in an email this spring, CSIU director Jack Chin said there were no plans to do so.

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A few weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling, I met the founding director of the CSIU, Rick Unklesbay, near the University of Arizona campus. A career prosecutor who’d helped send 16 people to the state’s death row, he now opposes the death penalty, explaining his reasons in a memoir published in 2019. Yet the danger of executing an innocent person was barely mentioned.

Unklesbay got the idea to start the office after hearing a segment about conviction review units on NPR, which featured the head of the National District Attorneys Association. “I’d been a prosecutor for, at that time, 30 years, and I’d never even heard of them,” he said. He and his boss discussed the way in which wrongful convictions “pretty much get ignored, because nobody had time, or the inclination, really. … And I thought, this would be a great semi-retirement job.”

“Somebody’s going to have to look at it at some point.”

The “unit” was more of a one-man show, although Unklesbay had access to support staff and some two-dozen investigators, law enforcement officers he’d known for years. The setup was not exactly designed to avoid bias; many conviction integrity units have been criticized for leaving prosecutors to police themselves. Despite his efforts to solicit applications from people in prison, Unklesbay said he had a hard time finding innocence cases. So he expanded the scope of the office to include cases in which people were serving sentences that were excessive or unfair.

Whatever the formal requirements listed on the Pima County Attorney’s website, it was clear that Unklesbay had wide discretion to review a case if he wanted to. But he believed that Jones was guilty. Although he agreed that the testimony from the lead detective at the 2017 evidentiary hearing was “horrible,” he knew her as “a good cop.” He also had a lot of respect for Kathy Mayer, the prosecutor in the case. “She was a wonderful attorney and she said, ‘Absolutely, he’s guilty.’”

Unklesbay conceded that he had not had a chance to go through the whole case file. But he said he had prepared to do so after speaking to me about the problem with his policy when it came to capital cases. “I remember it because it gave me a lot of pause. Because you said, ‘Well, but these are always on appeal, right up to the last moment.’ … It was like, well, you’re right. We can’t review it an hour before the execution.”

The tentative review didn’t get very far. As Unklesbay recalled, he pulled Jones’s file from the archives and got the evidentiary hearing transcripts. After a prosecutor was assigned to handle a possible retrial, he told her, “If you think we don’t have the right guy, then we’ll deal with it, but if you think you have a case, then we’ll go through it.”

But Jones’s case never came back to Pima County. By the time the attorney general’s office persuaded the Supreme Court to take the case, both Unklesbay and the prosecutor had left the office. As far as Unklesbay knew, the Jones file remained stored in a closet somewhere. If the case came back, he said he told a colleague before retiring, “somebody’s going to have to look at it at some point.”

Since then, the CSIU’s work has apparently ground to a halt. Chin lasted just over a year as the unit’s director — part of a wave of departures from the county attorney’s office, which has consistently made headlines for being in disarray. Last month, the Tucson Sentinel reported that the office had “stonewalled providing public records about Chin and his work.” Shortly afterward, a new lawyer took charge. According to a spokesperson, “He hasn’t had a chance to begin reviewing the Barry Jones case.”

The federal courthouse in downtown Tucson, Ariz., on Sept. 7, 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Unanswered Questions

In the meantime, there are still plenty of questions left to answer. The investigation by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in 1994 was disturbingly incomplete. Detectives ignored alternate suspects while neglecting to collect basic evidence, such as the clothes Rachel wore on the day before she died. Although investigators spoke to some people at the Desert Vista Trailer Park, where Jones lived with Rachel’s mother, Angela Gray, countless others were never interviewed by police.

Among the unanswered questions is why detectives never appear to have visited one of the central locations Jones went with Rachel the day before she died. According to the state, on Sunday, May 1, 1994, Jones assaulted Rachel in the parking lot of a grocery store called the Choice Market; a pair of 8-year-old twins claimed to have seen Jones hitting Rachel while driving his van. The twins, Laura and Ray Lopez, became key witnesses against Jones at trial. Yet police reports contain no interviews with anyone who might have seen Jones and Rachel together at the store.

A few days after I talked to Unklesbay, I met a woman named Stephanie at the East Lawn Palms Mortuary, where Rachel is buried. She brought items to place on the headstone: a small princess carriage and pink plastic roses.

Stephanie lived at the Desert Vista Trailer Park in the early 1990s. She and her husband, who went by Mo, were friendly with Jones. Although her recollections were sketchy, Stephanie had reached out with information that might have been game-changing for Jones’s defense. She said she was with her husband and two daughters at the Choice Market on the day before Jones’s arrest — and she was convinced that it was actually her husband, not Jones, whom the Lopez children must have seen.

As Stephanie recalled, on May 1, she was in the passenger seat of her van in the parking lot of the Choice Market when Mo, who was driving, backhanded her young daughter in the face. “She was sitting in the back and had gotten out of her seat,” Stephanie said. “He was kind of like pushing her back, saying, ‘Get back in your seat.’” Stephanie doesn’t remember seeing any young children around, but she said a woman yelled at her husband and threatened to call the police.

Stephanie brought photos of her husband and daughters. Mo had long hair, which at least partially matched the description the twins had given to police, of a man with “flying hair.” Her daughters had blonde hair, like the girl the children said they had seen. Although the van in the photos was a rust-colored 1960s Chevrolet panel wagon that did not bear much resemblance to Jones’s yellow 1970s Ford, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. On the stand at Jones’s trial, Ray Lopez did not recognize Jones’s yellow van when he was shown a photo.

Nevertheless, if there were reasons to be skeptical of Stephanie’s recollections, the accounts from the Lopez twins were themselves inconsistent and unreliable. Investigators interviewed the children in front of their mother, who had seen Jones on the news. “I knew right away the kids saw the same guy,” she told a detective — one of many red flags suggesting that their recollections had been contaminated from the start. Years later, in a 2009 affidavit, Ray Lopez told Jones’s legal team that he had not actually seen the face of the man driving the van. “I saw the man making swinging motions, but I did not see what he swung at nor did I see anyone else in the van.”

Stephanie had struggled with whether to share her recollections. She was fearful of retaliation from the state, which she relies upon for food stamps and housing. At the same time, she was haunted by the possibility that Jones would be executed for a crime he may not have committed. Like everyone I have spoken to who knew him at the Desert Vista, Stephanie insisted that he would never have hurt a child.

Society’s Best Interest

The prosecutors who fought to preserve Jones’s conviction no longer work for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. One is now a judge in Pinal County. The other, Myles Braccio, spent a year working for the Pima County Attorney’s Office before leaving this past August. He did not respond to emails about the case.

As the hearing in Tucson approached the one-hour mark, Burgess posed a frank question to the state. “What about the possibility of shortcutting all of this litigation … and coming up with some sort of negotiated disposition?” he asked. In other words, settling the case. If the lawyers could reach a deal that would allow the state to preserve some part of its case against Jones, it would save both sides a significant amount of time and money — and potentially allow Jones to leave death row.

“We’re always willing to discuss that,” Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Sparks replied. Burgess asked the question another way. “If what you’re telling me is, ‘Yeah, we’ll listen to what you say, but there’s no way we’re gonna settle this case,’ then I’m not gonna waste your time and his time and some other judge’s time with having a settlement discussion,” he said. “So what about it?”

Sparks said the state would be willing to enter into a settlement conference. Asked for his response, Sandman said it would be important for the Pima County Attorney’s Office to participate. Although the state attorney general’s office still had jurisdiction over the case, this was the office that had prosecuted Jones and sent him to death row. If Pima County prosecutors wished to stand by the conviction, they should be given a chance to do so.

Burgess seemed satisfied that both sides had reached a tentative agreement for moving forward. “I do think it would be in everybody’s best interest, including society’s best interest, if we can resolve this case,” he said. A settlement conference has been scheduled for early December.

Leaving the courtroom, Jones’s daughter Brandie fought back tears. She was encouraged by Burgess’s statement, she said. But “I was coming here just hoping that it’s the last time.”

The post Barry Jones Is Running Out of Options. Will He Ever Leave Death Row? appeared first on The Intercept.

Glossip’s life had been spared by Gov. Kevin Stitt, who paused the September 22 execution date amid explosive new evidence in the case. The stay of execution followed a petition filed by Knight to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, asking for a hearing to consider new evidence that cast further doubt on Glossip’s guilt. With a new execution date set for December 8, even more disturbing revelations had come to light: including evidence of prosecutorial misconduct so alarming that state Rep. Justin Humphrey called for an investigation into the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office.

“I was very reluctant, as a law enforcement officer, to look at this case,” Humphrey said at the press conference. But the investigative failures in Glossip’s case shook him to the core. Today Humphrey is convinced that not only should Glossip never have been sentenced to die, he also never should have been sent to prison. “Now I’m at the point we’re investigating the wrong people,” he said, calling the government’s conduct in Glossip’s case “extremely unethical.”

Humphrey is one of more than 60 state lawmakers who have raised alarm over Glossip’s case. The press conference came on the heels of a third report in as many months by the law firm Reed Smith LLP, which is conducting an independent investigation into the case at the lawmakers’ behest. Like the previous reports, the newest revelations expose how Oklahoma City prosecutors twice convicted Glossip despite clear indications that he was an innocent man.

Glossip was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese at the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel owned by Van Treese. No physical evidence connected Glossip to the crime. Instead, the case against Glossip was almost entirely based on the testimony of Justin Sneed, then 19, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death with a baseball bat inside Room 102. Sneed implicated Glossip as the mastermind behind the crime, but only after a highly coercive interrogation by Oklahoma City police detectives who repeatedly emphasized their belief that Glossip was involved.

From the beginning, Sneed offered wildly shifting accounts — starting with his confession to police and continuing through each of Glossip’s trials, where he was the star witness for the prosecution. In recent years, Sneed has continued to contradict himself, while a slew of new witnesses have come forward to say that he’d boasted about falsely implicating Glossip in order to save his own skin.

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Explosive New Evidence Points to Richard Glossip’s Innocence. Why Is Oklahoma Still Trying to Kill Him?

After failing to convince Stitt or the Oklahoma attorney general to investigate Glossip’s case, the Oklahoma lawmakers turned to Reed Smith in February 2022, and the firm took on the work pro bono. Thirty attorneys, three investigators, and two paralegals have reviewed over 12,000 documents and interviewed more than 36 witnesses. The firm’s first report was released in June. Since then they have released two additional reports, the most recent on September 20. In all, the reports contain bombshell revelations that paint the clearest picture to date of Glossip’s wrongful conviction.

Among the most compelling pieces of new evidence are handwritten letters from Sneed that reveal how close he came to taking back his story about Glossip. In 2003, a year before Glossip’s retrial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he sent the lawyer another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.” Although he didn’t specifically mention recanting, he suggested that he’d made a “mistake.” The lawyer, Gina Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.

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The most recent report digs deeper into Sneed’s conflicting statements, his efforts to recant, and prosecutors’ efforts to keep him in line. Investigators with Reed Smith interviewed Sneed in prison three times over the last month, for a total of more than eight hours. Portions of the interviews contained in the report show that Sneed’s account remains a mess of shifting narratives — save for his parroting of the key element of the prosecution’s theory of the case: that he was an impressionable young man lured into a murder plot. “It is disconcerting that the only details he appears to state consistently are that he killed Barry Van Treese, and that Glossip is to blame for it,” the report says.

The letters from Sneed to his attorney are not the first indication that Sneed sought to take back his story. In October 2014, O’Ryan Justine Sneed — Justin Sneed’s grown daughter — sent a letter to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board saying that she “strongly believe[s]” that Richard Glossip is an innocent man. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”

In his interviews with Reed Smith, Sneed confirmed for the first time that he had spoken to his daughter about a desire to break his plea deal and to recant. But he also insisted that by “recant,” he didn’t mean he necessarily wanted to change his story. During an interview on August 26, Sneed told Reed Smith that “it was more about silencing my testimony in the way of me not having to be there,” he said, and “taking back the plea agreement.”

In all, Sneed has spent 11 years discussing recanting “with various individuals that he trusts,” Reed Smith noted. “When these admitted statements from Sneed made to his family in 2014 are combined with the recently obtained letters written by Sneed from 2003 and 2007, all discussing ‘recanting’ or needing to ‘clean things up’ it is deeply troubling.”

Richard Glossip’s defense attorney Don Knight speaks onstage during the “Killing Richard Glossip” panel discussion in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2017.

Photo: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images for Discovery Communications

Bad Faith

Perhaps one of the most stunning new revelations is that the prosecutors who retried Glossip in 2004 were aware that Sneed had considered recanting — and took extraordinary steps to keep that from happening. “In his August 25, 2022 interview, Sneed confirmed that he met with representatives of the District Attorney’s Office along with his attorney, Gina Walker, before Glossip’s retrial where his plea agreement and his not wanting to testify were discussed,” the report says.

Notes found in the prosecutors’ file document a series of meetings with Assistant District Attorney Connie Smothermon, Sneed, and Walker regarding Sneed’s reluctance to testify — information that, by law, should have been turned over to the defense. Smothermon’s trial partner Gary Ackley told Reed Smith he didn’t know anything about this, and that it was cause for concern. “Any prosecutor would be concerned about any cooperating witness in any big case regarding the uncertainty of the waffling back and forth and the disingenuous bad faith nature of such actions,” Ackley said.

Not only was this information never disclosed to the defense, Smothermon also apparently worked with Sneed’s attorney as Glossip’s second trial was underway to keep Sneed in line. In a May 2004 memo to Walker, Smothermon laid out six detailed questions for Sneed based on the testimony already delivered by other witnesses at the retrial. The apparent goal was to try to square Sneed’s testimony with what others had said: a maneuver that would violate rules designed to insulate witness testimony from being contaminated by outside information or from the testimony of another witness.

The most egregious example involves testimony from Dr. Chai Choi, the medical examiner who conducted Van Treese’s autopsy. At the retrial, Choi testified that Van Treese had puncture wounds, “a stabbing-type injury,” to his chest. Although there was a knife found at the scene, Sneed had previously said that he did not use the knife — an inconsistency that Smothermon sought to fix before Sneed took the stand.

“Our biggest problem is still the knife,” Smothermon wrote in the memo to Walker. “Justin tells the police that the knife fell out of his pocket and that he didn’t stab the victim with it.” But when Sneed took the stand at the retrial, he testified for the first time that he had in fact stabbed Van Treese. “This reversal of his statement given to police does not appear to be a coincidence,” Reed Smith wrote. “Rather, it appears to be manufactured in response to ADA [Smothermon’s] communication during trial to Sneed’s attorney explicitly about what had been testified to by other witnesses about the knife.”

Ackley told Reed Smith that the change in Sneed’s testimony was “night and day,” and that if it was prompted by Smothermon’s memo, it would be a problem.

At the press conference, Knight, Glossip’s attorney, again emphasized the need for an evidentiary hearing. “It becomes ever more apparent with each passing day that not only did the prosecution destroy evidence, they manufactured evidence. They changed people’s testimony. They broke the rules. All to try to get a conviction against Rich Glossip on a death penalty case that should never have been brought at all,” he said. “The thing that I think everybody needs to take away from this: Rich Glossip is a nobody. He’s not some powerful person. He’s just like all the rest of us. This is what the government can do when they’re allowed to run amok.”

The post Oklahoma Lawmaker Calls for Investigation of Prosecutors Who Convicted Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

She was sitting with her husband in the living room of their ranch house on a sprawling piece of creek-side property nestled among Texas live oak trees. The color drained from Garcia’s face. A tear ran down her cheek. What’s wrong? her husband asked. They’d been through a lot in their decades together, but he’d never seen her react like this.

It was 2017, and the face on TV belonged to Justin Sneed, a slight man with gaunt cheeks. Garcia recognized him from 20 years earlier as the thieving, unpredictable maintenance man at a run-down Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.

On January 7, 1997, Sneed committed the brutal murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese inside Room 102. Back then, Garcia was working as an escort and dancer at the Vegas Club, a strip club that sat kitty-corner to the motel. She worked a club circuit with a group of women who traveled the country together, performing at venues from California to Oklahoma to Florida. When they were working at the Vegas Club, Garcia and her crew stayed at the Best Budget Inn, which was rife with drug dealing and prostitution.

Conditions had begun to change, however, after Van Treese hired 32-year-old Richard Glossip to manage the motel. “Richard was just a square, quiet-type guy, but hardworking,” Garcia recalled. He’d run off the worst of the drug trade and much of the revolving-door prostitution, though he let Garcia and her friends stick around. And he tried to fix the place up where he could. “He made that place better. He cleaned it up. He had places in the rooms painted. He had the ugliest plaid chairs put in,” she said. “And you could go out to your car at night and get something without being terrified.”

Sneed had come to town as part of a roofing crew from Texas, and Glossip brought him on to do some work around the motel in exchange for a place to stay. Garcia did not like Sneed; he was constantly stealing from motel guests in order to feed his growing drug habit. He fancied himself a pimp and tried to take money from Garcia’s friends. “He was slick. I mean, you turn your back on him, in a second he’ll have his hand in your purse,” she said. By the end of 1996, she recalled, Sneed was always high, often shooting methamphetamine. “He was just nasty with it,” she said. “He wouldn’t be able to find a vein, get mad at his needle, and he’d just throw it. … He disgusted me.”

The week before Van Treese’s murder, Garcia said Sneed was behaving particularly erratically. He’d grabbed one of her girlfriends by the throat, pinning her against a motel room wall. Garcia panicked, pulled a knife on Sneed, and told him to let her friend go. He did. She and her crew packed up and hit the road. They didn’t return until after Van Treese’s murder. When she heard what happened, Garcia’s first thought was that Sneed was responsible. “I said it right away,” she recalled.

Photos of Justin Sneed taken by Oklahoma City police in January 1997.

Photo Illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept and Joseph Rushmore; Photos: Courtesy of the Oklahoma City Police Department

What she didn’t expect was that detectives would quickly decide it was Glossip who’d put Sneed up to the crime. Police — and eventually prosecutors — fixated on a narrative that 19-year-old Sneed was merely a hapless dolt whom Glossip had coerced into carrying out a murder-for-hire plot. The motel operated mostly in cash, and Van Treese only came by periodically to collect the receipts and pay the staff. Once Van Treese was dead, the official story went, Glossip had promised to split whatever cash he had on him with Sneed.

To Garcia, this was nonsense. In her experience, Sneed was the dangerous one, aggressive and conniving. She tried to tell the police about him, but they wouldn’t listen. Instead, she said, they threatened her, telling her to keep her mouth shut about what had been going on around the motel or she would face arrest. Garcia, who’d been to prison before, heard the warning and got out of town.

Still, over the intervening years, she regularly thought about Glossip, Sneed, and the murder at the Best Budget Inn. She figured investigators would eventually realize that their suspicion of Glossip was unfounded. But sitting there in her home that night in 2017, the TV flickering in front of her, Garcia realized that hadn’t happened: Instead, Glossip had been charged with Van Treese’s murder and ended up on death row. He’d come close to execution multiple times.

Garcia has faced a lot of challenges in life. She escaped horrific childhood abuse; joined a carnival where she rode a motorcycle inside a metal cage; wrangled alligators and rattlesnakes at a roadside attraction; battled addiction and years of chronic medical problems. But seeing Sneed’s face, and learning of Glossip’s fate, shook her to the core. If only she’d stood up to the cops and told them what she knew about Sneed and the circumstances preceding Van Treese’s murder, she thought, things might have turned out differently. “That was the whole problem,” she said. “Richard would have never been there if us girls had stayed there and just took their bullshit, let them arrest us if they’re going to, and kept telling the truth.”

After seeing Sneed on TV, Garcia reached out to Don Knight, Glossip’s attorney. As it turned out, she was one of dozens of people who had information relevant to the case but were never interviewed by law enforcement. She hoped that her story would be enough to set the record straight. Instead, on July 1, the state of Oklahoma set a fourth execution date for Glossip.

As Glossip’s lawyers fight yet again to save the life of their client, Garcia can’t shake the feeling that she bears some responsibility for his fate. “It is my fault,” she said. “I’ve really been afraid that I’m going to take this to my grave.”’

Birds fly across the view of the strip club next door to the Inn in Oklahoma City, Okla., on August 18, 2022.

Photo: Joseph Rushmore for The Intercept

Things to Clean Up

Since the moment he was arrested in January 1997, Glossip has maintained his innocence for orchestrating the murder of Barry Van Treese. The Intercept was the first national news outlet to dig into his case; an investigation published in July 2015 revealed myriad problems plaguing Glossip’s conviction: a perfunctory and biased police investigation, aggressive prosecutors who cut corners and ignored glaring holes in their theory of the crime, and woefully inadequate defense lawyering that left much of the state’s story unchallenged.

The weakness of the state’s case against Glossip has been well known to the courts for years. Glossip’s original conviction was overturned in 2001 when the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that his attorneys had failed to adequately represent him at trial. After a second jury found him guilty in 2004, a federal judge noted that the evidence against Glossip was “not overwhelming” but upheld his conviction anyway.

As Glossip’s fourth execution date approached this summer, his legal team asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to grant them the opportunity to present new evidence that had never been heard in court. This week, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt ordered a 60-day stay of execution to allow the court to consider their request.

“There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” Sneed wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.”

In the meantime, new evidence continues to emerge that bolsters Glossip’s innocence claim. In the past two weeks alone, handwritten letters from Sneed have revealed how close he came to taking back his story about Glossip. In 2003, a year before Glossip’s retrial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he sent the lawyer another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.” Although he didn’t specifically mention recanting, he suggested that he’d made a “mistake.” The lawyer, Gina Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.

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There has never been any dispute over who actually killed Van Treese. In the early hours of January 7, 1997, Sneed carried a baseball bat and a set of master keys to Room 102, where he attacked the 54-year-old motel owner. Van Treese fought back, Sneed later said, knocking him into a window, which shattered. But Sneed eventually overpowered Van Treese, bludgeoning him to death. Sneed then moved Van Treese’s car to the parking lot of a nearby credit union, taking a stack of cash from under the driver’s seat. Sneed hid his bloody clothes and played dumb the following morning when Van Treese’s family called to say that he hadn’t made it home to Lawton, some 90 miles away. It wasn’t until 10 p.m. that night that Van Treese’s beaten body was discovered inside Room 102 amid a pile of blankets next to the bed. By that time, Sneed had fled the motel.

Oklahoma City Police Detectives Bob Bemo and William Cook headed up the investigation, which was cursory at best. The investigators failed to do even the most basic work, like talking to the numerous people who were staying at the motel at the time of the crime. Instead, they quickly latched on to a half-baked theory that has animated the case for nearly two decades: that Glossip coerced Sneed into murdering Van Treese in order to steal his money and take over the motel.

The cops became suspicious of Glossip in part because he’d failed to give them information that tied Sneed to the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, he was startled awake around 4 a.m. by Sneed knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Sneed stood outside with a black eye and told him that he’d run off some drunks who had broken a window while fighting in one of the motel rooms. As Sneed was walking away, Glossip said he asked him about his eye and Sneed flippantly responded that he’d killed Van Treese. It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that he realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, he didn’t tell the cops right away — he said his girlfriend had suggested that he wait until they figured out what was happening.

Reflections of S. Council Road in the front office window of the former Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City on Aug. 18, 2022.

Photo: Joseph Rushmore for The Intercept

The most glaring problem with the state’s narrative was the lack of any reliable evidence linking Glossip to the murder. The case against him was based almost solely on Sneed’s claim that Glossip had manipulated him into murdering their boss. The reasons to doubt Sneed’s account go beyond the obvious incentive for him to lie in order to escape the harshest punishment. Sneed’s confession was the result of a highly coercive interview led by Bemo, who all but convinced Sneed to blame Glossip. The detective repeatedly named Glossip as a possible conspirator — and even mastermind — before asking Sneed for his version of events.

“Everybody is saying you’re the one that did this, and you did it by yourself, and I don’t believe that,” Bemo told Sneed. “You know Rich is under arrest, don’t you?” No, Sneed said. “So he’s the one,” Bemo replied. “He’s putting it on you the worst.”

Coercion by the detectives who interviewed Sneed would have been crucial exculpatory evidence for Glossip. Yet the videotaped interrogation was never shown to the jurors who sent Glossip to death row. Over the course of two separate trials, lawyers for Glossip failed to use the videotape to show how Sneed’s claims against their client had been concocted with the help of police.

It was only while Glossip faced his second and third execution dates in September 2015 that his case began to attract wider press scrutiny. Up until that point, Glossip had been primarily known as the named plaintiff in a challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, which had reached the U.S. Supreme Court earlier that year. After the justices ruled in Oklahoma’s favor, giving the green light to execute Glossip, The Intercept published its first investigation into the case, followed by a wave of additional coverage. Soon thereafter, new witnesses began to come forward with information casting further doubt on Glossip’s guilt. Two men who had spent time with Sneed in jail separately contacted Glossip’s attorneys to say that Sneed had boasted about killing Van Treese and letting Glossip take the blame. Rather than investigate these claims, Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater took dramatic measures to silence these witnesses.

Richard Glossip gives an interview from Death Row in the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”

Still: Courtesy of Joe Berlinger; Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

Glossip came perilously close to execution in the fall of 2015, spared only by the state’s incompetence in securing the right lethal injection drugs. After it was revealed that Oklahoma had previously carried out an execution using the same erroneous drug it was poised to administer to Glossip, the state’s death penalty ground to a halt. Executions remained on hold for six years.

In the meantime, Glossip’s case continued to attract attention from activists, politicians, and the media. In 2017, documentarian Joe Berlinger released the four-part series “Killing Richard Glossip” — the series that caught Garcia’s attention. Among the major revelations in the documentary was an alternate scenario of the crime. According to a man who spent time with Sneed at the Oklahoma County Jail, Sneed said that he and a woman had lured Van Treese into Room 102 in order to rob him. In other words, this was a robbery gone bad, not a murder for hire.

Glossip’s case also caught the attention of a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers, many of them rock-ribbed pro-death penalty conservatives, who became concerned that the state planned to kill an innocent man. In May 2021, 34 Oklahoma state legislators, the majority of them Republicans, asked Stitt as well as the state’s Pardon and Parole Board to investigate Glossip’s case. When Stitt and the board failed to act, the lawmakers sought out the law firm Reed Smith LLP, asking for an independent investigation into the case. The firm took on the work pro bono; over the course of four months, 30 attorneys, three investigators, and two paralegals reviewed over 12,000 documents and interviewed more than 36 witnesses. The resulting 343-page report, released in June 2022, contains bombshell revelations that paint the clearest picture to date of Glossip’s wrongful conviction.

“Fundamental concerns and new information revealed by this investigation cast grave doubt as to the integrity of Glossip’s murder conviction and death sentence,” it reads. “The 2004 trial cannot be relied on to support a murder-for-hire conviction. Nor can it provide a basis for the government to take the life of Richard E. Glossip.”

The Oklahoma City Police Department building is seen on Aug. 18, 2022.

Photo: Joseph Rushmore for The Intercept

A Grave Error

Much of the report focuses on the shocking investigative failures of the Oklahoma City Police Department in 1997. Among the dozens of people interviewed by Reed Smith’s investigative team were employees or guests staying in one of the 19 rooms occupied at the Best Budget Inn the night of the murder. “The police should have canvassed all of the rooms in the motel to determine if there were any additional witnesses to what occurred,” the report’s authors write. Instead, the cops interviewed just four such people.

Detectives never interviewed Sneed’s roommate, the Reed Smith team found. Nor did they interview a motel housekeeper who said that she overheard Sneed telling someone on the phone that Van Treese was “going to get what he deserved,” nor a woman who reportedly heard glass breaking from outside the motel at the time of the crime.

But the report’s most stunning revelations cut to the heart of the state’s case against Glossip. New details about Van Treese’s finances and the motel’s inner workings undermine the state’s theory of the crime and debunk Glossip’s alleged motive for wanting Van Treese dead.

Underpinning the theory that Glossip compelled Sneed to kill Van Treese in return for half the cash stashed under the motel owner’s car seat was the contention that Glossip’s job was on the ropes. According to the state, Van Treese was upset to discover that Glossip had been embezzling funds from the Best Budget Inn — allegedly totaling about $6,100 in 1996 — and had traveled to Oklahoma City on January 6, 1997, to fire Glossip.

The embezzlement theory appears to have originated with Van Treese’s wife, Donna. At Glossip’s first trial, she testified that the family had returned home from a vacation on January 5, 1997, at which time she prepared a year-end report and discovered a $6,100 shortage for 1996. But oddly, there is no mention of any of this in the police reports — not the shortage calculation or the fact that her husband was planning to fire Glossip as a result. In fact, there is no indication that police ever formally interviewed Donna Van Treese. “The lack of any reporting of this from Ms. Van Treese to the police casts suspicion on the state’s motive theory,” the report reads.

“This ‘embezzlement’ theory should not have been presented to the jury. The prosecution should not have presented a theory it could not verify.”

There have always been fundamental problems with the embezzlement narrative, including that Barry Van Treese consistently paid Glossip a bonus for bringing in more revenue per month than had been forecast, which doesn’t square with the notion that any revenue was missing. The Reed Smith report lays out a wealth of additional evidence that there was no verifiable shortage to begin with and that the state peddled this narrative without confirming it. “This ‘embezzlement’ theory should not have been presented to the jury. The prosecution should not have presented a theory it could not verify, and the defense completely fell down in failing to object,” the Reed Smith team wrote. “The jury was told Glossip was stealing from the motel and was going to be fired for it, even though we have found no credible evidence that any of this was, in fact, true.”

At issue was the way in which the Van Treeses handled their motel finances, which appears to have been driven by deep financial problems that neither the jury nor, apparently, the defense knew about. According to the Reed Smith report, Van Treese was heavily in debt to both state and federal taxing entities, and his two motels — the family had a Best Budget Inn in Tulsa as well as the one in Oklahoma City — were mortgaged to the hilt. His accountant, who was never interviewed by police, told the Reed Smith team that the IRS had levied Van Treese’s bank accounts.

Because of the financial problems, which dated back roughly a decade, the Van Treeses had all but abandoned the banking system and were operating almost entirely in cash, much of which was kept in Van Treese’s car. The accountant, Dudley Bowdon, recalled an incident in which Van Treese had paid him for his services from a supply of cash that he kept under his car seat. A receipt for the transaction was recorded on a restaurant napkin.

Blood on a $100 bill found in Justin Sneed’s possession after the murder of Barry Van Treese.

Photo: Courtesy of the Oklahoma City Police Department

The state’s core claim that there was a $6,100 shortfall for 1996 — and thus that Glossip had been embezzling money — was calculated by Donna using an improper accounting method, which two forensic accountants say was unreliable and could not be verified. The shortfall was based on Donna’s “business volume” calculations, which were generated by taking an average of the daily room rate — rounded up or down — multiplied by the number of rooms rented. In other words, Donna’s assertion that there was a shortage was based solely on her income projections and not actual revenue. “Over a course of a full year, this could lead to a meaningful discrepancy,” the Reed Smith team wrote. “This methodology of rounding numbers up or down may be an appropriate business forecasting method, but it is not appropriate when attempting to show embezzlement as a motive in a capital murder case.”

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What’s more, the team found evidence that Van Treese did not record cash income that was smaller than a $5 bill. As such, Donna’s shortage calculation, “even if accepted,” could be readily explained by Van Treese’s collection habits, the report concluded, “meaning there was no shortage at all.”

Nonetheless, the court allowed Donna’s assertions to stand — even though doing so appears to have violated Oklahoma law, which requires that underlying financial records be admitted into evidence. The majority of those records weren’t available though. Some had been lost in a flooding event at the Van Treese home, Donna testified. And others had been destroyed by the state.

The report also sheds light on astonishing mishandling of evidence in the case. “Police appear to have lost a surveillance video tape showing the night of the murder from the Sinclair Gas Station which was within walking distance from the Best Budget Inn,” it reads. Sneed went to the gas station around the time of the murder; the tape could have provided evidence to support or contradict his story. As the report points out, the surveillance footage could have also revealed whether or not Sneed was by himself.

“The Glossip deal horrifies me. I have no idea how something like this could happen.”

Even worse was the willful destruction of key evidence prior to Glossip’s second trial. Although records show the official reason given by the DA’s office for destroying this evidence was that Glossip’s appeals had been exhausted, this was far from the truth. Retired prosecutor Gary Ackley, who assisted the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s retrial, told investigators that the DA’s office “had a long-standing agreement with the Oklahoma City Police Department to never destroy evidence in a capital murder case.”

Yet Reed Smith interviewed several career Oklahoma City law enforcement officers who described how prosecutors explicitly requested that evidence be destroyed in 1999, in contravention of the office’s own policy. Not only did prosecutors ask police to destroy a box of evidence in Glossip’s case, but the DA’s office also created a new case number “solely for this destruction of this box of evidence,” according to one detective who previously worked in the police crime lab. Ordinarily, the original case number would be used. This conduct was clearly aberrant and unnerving to those interviewed by Reed Smith. One law enforcement officer said it was “not the way it’s supposed to be done.” Ackley was especially blunt. “The Glossip deal horrifies me,” he said. “I have no idea how something like this could happen.”

The box destroyed in 1999 contained 10 items, eight of which Reed Smith identified as being especially important to Glossip’s defense. They included handwritten accounting logbooks that Van Treese kept in his car — a deposit book containing the motel’s financial records and two receipt books containing the motel’s expenses. As the report makes clear, these were “the very financial records … that Glossip would need to definitely disprove there was embezzlement.”

Other destroyed evidence included items recovered from the crime scene that had obvious forensic value, including a shower curtain Sneed used to cover the broken window in Room 102, a roll of duct tape he used to hang the shower curtain, and a wallet that, according to Sneed, had been handled by Glossip yet was never tested for fingerprints. Finally, there were items whose descriptions were vague enough to leave the question of their evidentiary value unanswered, such as an envelope with a note and a “white box with papers.”

It is not clear what these items might have revealed had they been preserved as required. What is clear is that “Glossip did not have any of this evidence for his retrial or any of his post-conviction efforts,” the report emphasizes.

“The state should not be absolved from how grave of an error this is,” the Reed Smith team concluded. “The state’s destruction of evidence is … inexcusable in a capital murder case.”

A spider sits in its web in a walkway of the former Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City on Aug. 18, 2022.

Photo: Joseph Rushmore for The Intercept

A Significant Threat

And then there is Justin Sneed.

To hear the state tell it, Sneed was simply too clueless to have orchestrated the murder of Van Treese on his own, notwithstanding the savagery of his actions on January 7. But the Reed Smith investigation makes clear not only that Sneed was far savvier than the prosecution made him out to be, but also that the state had evidence of this in its possession long before Glossip was ever tried.

And there were other signs that should have raised red flags — including Sneed’s shifting story about the money Glossip allegedly promised to pay him.

Sneed gave various accounts of how much Glossip offered him for the murder but eventually landed on $4,000, which Glossip allegedly told him would be found under Van Treese’s car seat. Sneed said that he was given around $2,000. When Glossip was arrested on January 9, he had $1,757 on him — proof, as the prosecution would have it, that Sneed’s story made sense. In accepting this at face value, however, the prosecution dismissed key information. First, according to Glossip, his money had come from his paycheck as well as the proceeds from selling several personal items, which he did, he said, in order to hire an attorney to help him deal with the cops. Glossip said that after he was first questioned by police, a friend warned him not to speak to them again without representation; Glossip was ultimately arrested upon exiting the office of an Oklahoma City attorney.

There was no physical evidence linking Glossip’s money to the murder. There was no blood on it, as there was on bills Sneed had in his possession, and there were no similar serial numbers or denominations among the two pots of cash.

And there was an even bigger problem, Reed Smith found, which further discredited Sneed’s story about splitting money with Glossip. Records reflect that the total receipts collected by Van Treese from the motel that week amounted to less than $3,000. One forensic accountant estimated that the amount of cash Van Treese would have collected was actually closer to $2,000, which would account only for the money in Sneed’s possession.

There was no physical evidence linking Glossip’s money to the murder.

Ruling on Glossip’s appeal of his second conviction, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals pointed to the alleged money split as critical evidence backing Sneed’s version of the murder plot. “The most compelling corroborative evidence, in a light most favorable to the state, is the discovery of money in Glossip’s possession,” the court wrote.

The court accepted the notion that were it not for Glossip, Sneed wouldn’t have known about the money in Van Treese’s car. This too was wrong. “He always kept money,” Garcia said of Van Treese. It was common knowledge among the motel regulars, including Sneed, who Garcia said had been agitating to steal from Van Treese for a while — including by trying to get one of her fellow dancers to help out. “I guarantee it,” she said. “It was talked about.” She said she made it clear to her friends that they should not mess with Van Treese; she let them know that “if they had anything to do with that,” they’d “never work another night in any club I was in.”

She said Sneed was constantly in search of money to feed his drug habit and recalled one particularly chilling incident: After complaining about not having money for drugs, Sneed picked up a brick and wandered off. Later, he returned with about $500 and blood on his shirt. Others who were hanging around the motel recalled similar interactions with Sneed. Jamie Spann, who worked at the roofing company with Sneed and shared a room with him at the Best Budget Inn, said in an affidavit that Sneed regularly stole items from other roofers and that he’d seen him steal from one of the houses they were working on. He said that Sneed walked around the motel like he “owned” the place and “wanted everyone to pay him to sell drugs.” He said Sneed wanted those engaging in sex work at the motel to split their profits with him — an allegation that Garcia has also made against Sneed.

None of these behavioral problems were new. Spann had known Sneed since childhood and said he’d been a manipulative “bully type.” Sneed was frequently in trouble for fighting and mouthing off, the Reed Smith team found. In fact, although prosecutors portrayed him as guileless for the jury, Sneed’s troubling history was known to the state prior to Glossip’s first trial. In a competency report provided to the state in 1997, a forensic psychologist found that if Sneed were to be released without “treatment, therapy, or training,” he would “pose a significant threat to the life or safety” of himself or others.

The report, which was completed before Sneed pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Glossip, also noted that Sneed had a criminal history in Texas — including for burglarizing a house and making a bomb threat against a friend’s school. Sneed explained away each incident by claiming that someone else had forced his hand.

Where the murder of Van Treese is concerned, Sneed has never been able to keep his story straight. His testimony from Glossip’s first trial morphed significantly by the time he testified again in 2004 — roughly a year after he’d asked his lawyer if he could recant — incorporating additional details he’d never told police that were not supported by any evidence. All of this should have raised concern for the state. Instead, prosecutor Connie Smothermon told the jury that such inconsistencies could be explained by the fact that she was simply better at asking questions than her predecessor on the case. “I’m not going to apologize for asking more questions than anybody else did before,” she said, “because, you know, that’s me, I’m a questioner.”

When questioned about the crime in recent years, Sneed has continued to give inconsistent answers. In a 2015 interview with The Frontier, he made the bizarre claim that he had no idea why Glossip would’ve wanted Van Treese dead. The Intercept sent Sneed an email asking about the letters he wrote indicating that he wanted to recant his testimony. He did not respond.

A door of the former Best Budget Inn stands ajar in Oklahoma City on Aug. 18, 2022.

Photo: Joseph Rushmore for The Intercept

A Haunting Experience

Since Glossip last faced execution in 2015, numerous witnesses in addition to Garcia have come forward to share what they knew with his legal team. Their accounts are contained in a flurry of affidavits that consistently portray Sneed as violent and cunning.

“I was shocked to hear that anyone had tried to portray him as someone who is slow, or could be manipulated by anyone, let alone Richard Glossip,” said one man who used to sell drugs at the Best Budget Inn. A roofer who briefly lived with Sneed at an Oklahoma City apartment said that after the murder took place, Sneed returned to the house acting strange. He had a black eye and was “really nervous,” refusing to leave the house and looking out the window a lot. A different roommate eventually saw Sneed on TV and turned him in, according to the affidavit, yet “no one from the defense or the prosecution ever came to talk to me about this.”

Perhaps the most damning accounts come from people who were once incarcerated with Sneed. Among them is Paul Melton, who spent 13 months with him at the Oklahoma County Jail starting in March 1997.

Melton remembers feeling concerned for Sneed at first. “I kind of felt bad for him when I first met him because he was green to prison life, to jail,” he said. “In Oklahoma, that’s very dangerous.” It’s not that Sneed was naïve, exactly. In fact, he was a “hustler” who made money selling cigarettes to his neighbors. But at the same time, “Justin wouldn’t shut his mouth,” Melton said. He would talk openly about his case in a way that was reckless. He remembered telling Sneed, “Everything you’re doing right now is going to follow you to prison, so you better shut your mouth.”

As Melton recalls it, Sneed was clear from the start that he had killed Van Treese on his own. But he also corroborated the account introduced in “Killing Richard Glossip,” in which Sneed and a woman had lured Van Treese to Room 102 as part of a plan to rob him. Melton said this was something Sneed had done a number of times to motel guests. Unlike their previous targets, Van Treese fought back, escalating the confrontation until Sneed killed him. “Justin Sneed and a girl set this up, and it was a robbery went south,” Melton said.

As Melton recalls, Sneed laughed about the fact that Glossip would get the death penalty instead of him.

Garcia also recalled Sneed targeting motel guests this way. “Sneed would use some of the girls who worked at the club to lure men into the rooms so he could set the men up and rob them,” she said in a 2018 affidavit. Both she and Melton described one such woman as Sneed’s girlfriend, but Garcia also said that Van Treese was her “sugar daddy,” giving her gifts and money. Garcia, who worked with the woman, said the police knew about Van Treese’s proclivities but wanted her to keep quiet about it. This is why they never listened to her about Sneed and instead threatened to arrest her if she talked. “If I go saying that Barry was a sugar daddy and I’m running a prostitution ring, I’m going back to prison for a very long time,” Garcia said she was told.

Melton was in jail with Sneed when he cut his deal with the Oklahoma City DA’s office. As he recalls, Sneed laughed about the fact that Glossip would get the death penalty instead of him. “And that’s what stuck with me. He thought it was funny.”

Others who spent time in jail with Sneed were similarly bothered by his boasting about setting up Glossip. At least one tried to tell the state about it long before Glossip went to death row. In May 1997, a letter arrived at the office of then-Oklahoma County DA Robert Macy, from a man who had recently spent time in the county jail. That man, Fred McFadden, had contacted Macy at least once before to share “an experience that truly haunts me.” While in jail, McFadden heard Sneed bragging openly about what he had done to Glossip. At the time, he was sitting at a table along with another man. “He and I were both so disgusted we got up from the table and walked around the pod,” McFadden wrote. “It quite frankly angered both of us.”

In his May 1997 letter, McFadden shared the name of the other man with Macy. But there’s no evidence that the DA followed up on the tip. Instead, prosecutors continued their case against Glossip, sending him to death row the following year.

McFadden died in 2015. Melton did not want to carry what he knew to his grave. When Glossip’s legal team contacted him asking if he’d spent time in the Oklahoma County Jail in 1997, he agreed to speak to them — even though he feared retaliation from Oklahoma authorities. Like Garcia, he feels deep guilt over his failure to share what he knew about Sneed years ago. He broke down in tears during multiple phone calls, expressing anguish and regret that he’d ever met Sneed. “I am not OK with an innocent man being murdered,” he said. “And I know [Glossip] was set up because the murderer told me.”

The post Explosive New Evidence Points to Richard Glossip’s Innocence. Why Is Oklahoma Still Trying to Kill Him? appeared first on The Intercept.

After pursuing legal avenues that went nowhere, Sirrena turned to social media, where she posted videos telling her story. She urged anyone who might know something to come forward. This man was one of several people who had recently offered to help. He said he had known her son — and “that he knows some people that know some people that’s supposed to get in contact with me about this,” Sirrena said. In her quest for the truth, even vague tips were a lifeline. She found the man’s message and pulled it up for me to see. “Atlanta is a bad place that did a lot of bad things to good people,” he wrote. “They did your son bad and I know this.”

I met Sirrena Buie on August 1 at her home just south of Birmingham, Alabama. Employed at the deli counter at a Publix supermarket, she also does freelance catering, posting photos of her colorful fruit platters on TikTok. Her account is otherwise full of family photos, pictures of Kedric set to music, and video updates describing her fight for justice. “They expected for me to give up,” she said in a video posted in May. “But I haven’t.”

Sirrena Buie holds a framed photo of her son Kedric Buie outside her home in Birmingham, Ala., on Aug. 1, 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Buie always starts her story the same way. It was 10:50 a.m. on August 13, 2017, and she was sitting at the same kitchen table with her then-husband. They were eating Brussels sprouts. When her phone rang, she almost didn’t answer. “I thought it was a bill collector or something,” she told me. Instead, it was a woman calling from USP Atlanta. The woman told her that Kedric had been found dead in his cell. At first it didn’t register. “I just talked to my son yesterday,” Buie remembers saying. “And y’all found him dead?”

“I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t do nothing.” She walked toward the bathroom but broke down in the hallway. The woman said she would call back later so that Buie could compose herself. “And I said OK.” But when the woman called back, she had no information. She couldn’t offer any details about what had happened to Kedric or even the name of the hospital where he had been taken. She told Buie not to come to Georgia.

The next hours were chaotic. Kedric’s identical twin brother, Kemon, heard the news from their father and got a ride to Buie’s home, jumping out of the car while it was still moving and running toward the house. “He could not pull himself together,” she said. Perhaps her most vivid memory was finding out that her son’s body had finally arrived in Birmingham 10 days after his death. When she saw Kedric, he looked severely swollen. His hands were clenched, and there appeared to be a gash on his forehead. “It didn’t seem real,” Buie said.

Everyone wanted to know what had happened to Kedric. But Buie could not answer their questions. As Christmas approached, she sent an open records request to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which provided her son’s autopsy report. The five-page document raised more questions than answers. It said that Kedric had received his breakfast on the morning of August 13 and was found “unresponsive” in his cell an hour later, minutes before 8 a.m. At 9:05 he arrived at the Atlanta Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

A Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner conducted the autopsy two days later. Kedric’s body had arrived at his office dressed in a “red inmate jumpsuit,” two pairs of boxer shorts, and only one shoe. The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was “hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” based on Kedric’s enlarged heart, a severely clogged artery, and the fact that he was “morbidly obese.” The manner of death was classified as “due to natural causes.”

But the autopsy report also contained information that alarmed Buie. On the first page were the words “EVIDENCE OF ACUTE INJURY,” followed by technical descriptions of wounds to Kedric’s back and scalp. A summary of findings listed “blunt trauma of the head” and “blunt force trauma of the torso and left lower extremity.” Although the document noted that there were “no life-threatening injuries,” the words left Buie cold. When she later spoke to the medical examiner, he told her that the injuries had occurred close to the time of Kedric’s death. He insisted that her son had died of a heart attack. But “he could not explain the trauma to my son’s body,” she said. He also discouraged her from seeking the autopsy photos, saying “that I needed to remember him the way I remember him.” She found this suspicious. If her son died from a heart attack, why should the photos be so upsetting?

On the advice of a friend, Buie contacted an independent pathologist who represented the families of people who had died in law enforcement custody. He told her that he did not believe the official findings, she said. Not long afterward, a high-profile lawyer agreed to represent her in a wrongful death suit. Over email in June 2019, he told her that the case was “really taking shape.” The lawyer said the pathologist was firm that Kedric had been beaten up — and that the official story was false. “He was very clear,” the lawyer wrote. “He said, ‘You know how they do.’”

Sirrena Buie looks through records related to the death of her son Kedric Buie at USP Atlanta in 2017.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

The Atlanta Way

Buie is one of countless family members still fighting for answers years after their loved ones died of “natural causes” in Bureau of Prisons custody. A lack of information from BOP officials often compounds the confusion and anguish. This struggle became especially pronounced during the Covid-19 pandemic, which heightened the frustrations of family members navigating a prison bureaucracy whose lack of transparency is notorious.

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The BOP routinely sends press releases documenting deaths in its facilities but provides little information beyond a decedent’s name, age, and the crime for which they were sent to prison. Although media outlets sometimes report on such cases, people are often imprisoned far from home, making their deaths easier for local news to overlook. Last month alone, the BOP’s Information, Policy, and Public Affairs Division sent five media notices about deaths at four different federal prisons, with the deceased ranging from 37 to 71 years old.

In an email, BOP spokesperson Scott Taylor confirmed that Kedric “passed away on August 13, 2017, while in custody at the United States Penitentiary Atlanta. However, this office does not provide additional information on deceased inmates.” According to the BOP, his death was one of six at USP Atlanta in 2017. The penitentiary has a reputation for being uniquely dangerous for residents and employees alike. Media reports have long exposed the medium-security prison as a cesspool of drugs, corruption, and violence. The year Kedric died, a federal complaint described how the Atlanta Police Department had spent years “investigating instances of inmates temporarily escaping from the prison camp at USP Atlanta and frequently returning to the camp with contraband.” In 2018, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “a prisoner used a cellphone to record a 49-minute long Facebook Live session, where he bragged that he had murdered a man and got away with it.”

USP Atlanta was the subject of a U.S. Senate hearing on July 26, a week before I met Buie. The penitentiary has been under investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs since September. Investigators uncovered thousands of pages of internal reports along with explosive accounts from dozens of former employees. As my colleague Akela Lacey reported, the hearing featured testimony from the head of the BOP himself and painted “a damning picture of a bloated federal prison system run by well-informed and willfully inactive leaders.”

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Presiding over the hearing was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In his opening statement, he decried the “stunning long-term failures” at USP Atlanta, whose staff “engaged in misconduct with impunity and, according to BOP’s own internal investigations, lacked regard for human life.” Subsequent witnesses described the prison as so out of control that the lawlessness and lack of accountability had been given a name: “the Atlanta way.”

A whistleblower who worked as the chief psychologist at USP Atlanta from 2018 to 2021 testified that the inhumane conditions contributed to a disproportionate number of suicides at the prison. “In the roughly four years, eight inmates at USP Atlanta died by suicide, two prior to my arrival and six during my tenure,” she said. “To put this into perspective, federal prisons typically see between one and three suicides over a five-year period.” A Georgia federal defender said she had seen her clients become emaciated during their time at the facility due to the spoiled and inedible food they received. And a former prison administrator said she was forced into early retirement after trying to address gross misconduct at the prison — including staffers’ physical abuse of incarcerated people.

The testimony supported what I had repeatedly been told about USP Atlanta while covering conditions at federal facilities in the early days of the pandemic. One formerly incarcerated man called it “unlivable,” a crumbling hellhole filled with cockroaches. Several others described correctional officers as openly cruel. “I heard an inmate complain that he was having trouble breathing and the CO told him, ‘Good motherfucker, take short breaths,’” one man incarcerated at the prison wrote in a letter.

But the hearing did not include any witnesses who could describe how hard it was to get basic information after the death of a loved one at USP Atlanta. Although BOP protocol dictates that family notification is handled by the warden or a warden’s representative, Buie says no one from the warden’s office ever contacted her.

“I heard an inmate complain that he was having trouble breathing and the CO told him, ‘Good motherfucker, take short breaths.’”

Other families say the same thing. After 36-year-old Billy Joe Soliz died at USP Atlanta in 2020, his sister told a TV station in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, that the warden had ignored calls from the family. “We’ve been trying to talk to the prison and trying to get ahold of the prison, and they will not answer the phone, they won’t contact us back,” she said. Like Kedric, Soliz was reportedly found “unresponsive” in his cell. And like Kedric, he seemed fine in his last phone call with his mother the day before he died.

Even those who examine the bodies of people who die in federal custody say information can be sparse. Forensic pathologist Kris Sperry, who was Georgia’s chief medical examiner from 1997 to 2015, said the Georgia Bureau of Investigation does not have jurisdiction to investigate deaths at USP Atlanta. In the case of an obvious homicide, the FBI would take charge and send a representative to attend the autopsy. “But for nonhomicide deaths, you know, just somebody … found dead in his cell, no one ever came to the autopsy,” Sperry said. “The amount of information that we had was severely limited. We had to completely depend on what someone at the prison told us.” Although he sometimes received information about a person’s medical history from a prison hospital physician, it could be “almost impossible to get ahold of anyone at the prison to give us … answers about real basic stuff. Like when was he last seen alive? Silly things like that.”

At the hearing, Ossoff seemed particularly disturbed by the deaths of people who had not yet been convicted of any crime; many of those held at USP Atlanta are pretrial detainees. “We’re talking about human beings in the custody of the U.S. government,” he said. After grilling the outgoing director of the BOP, Michael Carvajal, for his failure to fix the problems at USP Atlanta, Ossoff expressed hope that change might be on the horizon. “There has got to be change at the Bureau of Prisons. And it has to happen right now. And with your departure and the arrival of a new director, I hope that moment has arrived.”

Kedric Buie during a visit with a loved one while incarcerated in federal prison.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

A Verified Threat

Kedric Buie was not a pretrial detainee. Nor was he innocent of his crime. In 2009, at the age of 18, he and Kemon were arrested after carjacking a woman in a CVS parking lot in a Birmingham suburb. Along with a third man, they took the victim’s keys at gunpoint and forced her into the back of her Toyota 4Runner, releasing her a few minutes later, according to police.

Federal prosecutors conceded that the third man “was more of the instigator” and had recruited the brothers to help commit the crime. But the sentencing judge was angered by a statement Kedric made in court, in which he expressed remorse but also said he hoped to leave prison young enough to “play me some NFL football.” She sentenced him to 12 years and eight months in prison. Kemon received a shorter sentence and was released in 2016.

“I do hate that I’m punishing your family,” the judge told Kedric as she handed down his sentence. But he would still be a young man when he got out, she said. “This doesn’t have to be the end of your life.”

Prison records show that Kedric feared his time at USP Atlanta could become a death sentence. Last year a reporter helped Sirrena Buie obtain a case file revealing that Kedric had asked to be placed in protective custody less than two months before he died. The records showed the prison had conducted an investigation in June 2017, which concluded that “a verified threat to inmate Buie’s safety does exist” and “he is to be considered a verified protection case at this facility.”

Kedric feared his time at USP Atlanta could become a death sentence.

“I was devastated,” Buie said. She knew Kedric did not like to tell her things that would make her worry. But she was also skeptical. The report was heavily redacted and contained information that only raised more questions. One page noted that Kedric had engaged in “self-harm” via an unnamed toxic substance two weeks before he died. Prison staff also claimed to find black tar heroin in his cell on the day of his death, but the drug was not in his system. Buie felt the prison was seeking to blame Kedric for his own death.

According to people who had contacted her over the years saying they had information about Kedric’s death, the prevailing rumor at USP Atlanta was that he had been killed by a guard. In her own conversations with her son, he complained about one guard who had repeatedly spit into his food. “He said, ‘Mom, they do everything, they do anything,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s not the inmates, it’s the officers.’” But according to a lieutenant who reportedly interviewed Kedric inside a special housing unit where he was temporarily isolated, “inmate Buie is a known thief within his housing unit,” which had made him a target among “Muslim inmates and inmates from Alabama.” Although Kedric was both Muslim and from Alabama, “both inmate communities indicate Buie has brought unwanted attention, and will have to deal with the consequences of his actions if he returns to the unit.”

The file does not reveal why, if there was a verified threat against Kedric, he would have been returned to his unit, where he died just over a month later. But it is consistent with descriptions of staff at USP Atlanta showing indifference to the safety and well-being of those in their custody. “They knew what was going on, and they did not care,” Buie said.

In the first few years following her son’s death, Buie hoped that a lawsuit might be the best way to get answers from the BOP. She was especially optimistic that the independent medical examiner, Dr. Adel Shaker, would be able to prove that her son had been killed. In June 2019, her lawyer sent her a draft affidavit outlining Shaker’s tentative findings in the case. It said that Kedric had “died as a result of a blunt force trauma he suffered to the head.” But the affidavit was never signed, and the lawyer became mired in legal problems. Following multiple arrests in 2019, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and public intoxication. In 2020 he made headlines for a drunken disturbance at a Florida hotel, where he was witnessed “berating two hotel patrons with racial slurs,” according to one news report. He is currently suspended from practicing in Alabama.

When we met in Birmingham, Buie told me that she had been unable to reach Shaker for a long time. He stopped answering her calls after her lawyer dropped the case. As it turned out, he too had been arrested. After going to work as the chief medical examiner in Nueces County, Texas, he became the subject of a criminal probe alleging sweeping violations of the Texas Occupations Code. The case is ongoing. In the meantime, a mother in Mobile, Alabama, accused Shaker of taking thousands of dollars to perform a private autopsy of her son, whom she suspected had been beaten to death. But she said the autopsy was never done. (Shaker denied the allegations, telling reporters that she was simply unhappy with the results.)

In a brief phone call, Shaker said he did not recall Kedric’s case. But after reviewing the draft affidavit laying out his supposed findings, he said he had refused to sign the document because he never received sufficient materials to render an opinion one way or another. Although he remembered speaking to Buie, he denied ever telling her that her son’s death was a homicide.

Sperry, Georgia’s former chief medical examiner, said the findings in Kedric’s autopsy report point clearly to a heart attack. If Buie was told otherwise, it would not be the first time he had seen a grieving family member misled by an expert. “If you look hard enough, you can find a forensic pathologist who will agree with what you want him to agree to, as long as you write out a check,” he said. Buie never paid Shaker or her attorney any money. But when it comes to skewed autopsy results, law enforcement agencies are in a far more powerful position than families like hers. Flawed or biased autopsies have historically been used to convict the innocent or evade accountability, especially when the subjects are Black.

“I’m done with lawyers. Giving me money is not going to tell me what happened to my son.”

In a phone call, Dr. Colin Hebert, the pathologist who conducted Kedric’s autopsy for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, stood by his findings. Hebert, who now works for the Fulton County Medical Examiner, confirmed that Kedric’s injuries occurred close to the time of his death. “I don’t know how they got there,” he said. But it was not unusual to see bruises on a person who died of cardiac arrest. In Kedric’s case, he peeled back the skin and subcutaneous fat in the places where he found bruising to assess the depth of the trauma and found nothing alarming. Photos of this process are graphic, he explained, which was “probably one of the reasons I discouraged the mom to see the photos.”

Buie has considered the possibility that her son died of a heart attack after being beaten rather than dying from a beating itself. But until she has a complete picture of the circumstances leading up to her son’s death, she will not accept anything authorities have to say. In the meantime, “I’m done with lawyers,” she said. She has never been especially interested in any money a potential lawsuit would bring: “Giving me money is not going to tell me what happened to my son.”

The day after I met Buie, the BOP swore in its new director, an official with a reformer’s reputation. “Together we will work to ensure that our correctional system is effective, safe, and humane for personnel and incarcerated persons,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the ceremony. Buie was unaware of the change. A new director would make little difference for her, she said. The system was not going to put anyone in charge who would give her answers about her son.

On Saturday, the fifth anniversary of Kedric’s death, Buie shared commemorative posts on TikTok, accompanied by “I Miss You” by Kim McCoy and “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” by Boyz II Men. She had hoped to go to Kedric’s gravesite that morning, but she was struggling. After the weekend, she would go back to seeking answers. As she once said in a video, if the BOP had been transparent from the start, maybe she would not still be doing all of this. But “right now, I want closure. I want to know every detail.”

The post Will a Federal Investigation Reveal the Truth About Deaths at USP Atlanta? appeared first on The Intercept.